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Cosatu president Sdumo Dlamini wants businesses to increase their payment to the development skills levy by 400%. This would go to fund the dysfunctional Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) and the non-performing National Skills Fund, both of which underspend their collective budget of about R19 billion. It is misguided to demand more money from our businesses for a mismanaged training system that does not work and does not have the capacity to even spend its present budget.

Unfortunately, Minister of Higher Education and Training, Blade Nzimande, still supports the SETAs, despite their well-known problems. Speaking at the National Skills Summit yesterday in Pretoria, where Cosatu also made its ominous demand for the higher levy on business, he called for "radical measures" to fix our growing skills deficit. But sticking with the broken SETAs system isn't radical at all. It's not even a solution, it's a continuation of the problem.

Currently, businesses that make over R500,000 per year pay a 1% levy on their annual wage bill. This delivers between R15-16 billion for the state to use on training. The outcome of government's efforts have been meager and, from most employers' perspectives, not worth the money. Businesses must often re-train workers who come from the SETA programmes, which means they end up paying twice for training. For Cosatu to suggest that all businesses (not just those earning R500,000 and above) should give up a full 4% of their payroll to fund the underspending SETAs and National Skills Fund is self-defeating. Why would they want to create a bloated administration that cannot spend their money effectively on training their future union members? The unions' trust in government to solve our massive skills problem is naïve. But the Minister's trust in SETAs for raising our skills level is "radically" short-sighted.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) proposes scrapping the SETAs so that we can shift our attention to Further Education and Training (FET) colleges which can work with businesses to train up skilled workers. Government should act as a facilitator, rather than the controlling agent, in the relationship between industry and education. We should invite business to participate with the FETs in identifying their training needs so that they can work together in producing the appropriate curriculum and standards for an effective workforce. Right now the huge SETA bureaucracy stands between them, stifling their ability to react quickly to the skills needs of industry. We want to incentivize skills development directly by granting businesses tax rebates for training people in-house, by encouraging the growth of sector-wide training bodies that are run by industry itself, and by ramping up FETs so that they can accommodate 1.5 million of the 2.4 million unemployed youth between the ages of 18-24. Rather than having SETAs try to direct economic traffic, we should let businesses, educators and skills-seekers engage with each other directly. Our job is to assure that our educational institutions are equipped to make that engagement fruitful. When we do that, businesses and job seekers will prosper.