Address by H E Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Deputy President of the Republic of South Africa at the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA), Sandton Convention Centre

Programme Director
Government Ministers
Auditor-General
Business leaders
University representatives
Honoured guests
Ladies and gentlemen

Thank you so much for the invitation today to this wonderful occasion. Congratulations to the outgoing chairperson, you have played your part very well and of course I am sure the incoming chairperson will also do her best and the broader membership is here to be of support.

We would like to note the partnership in the work that you do with government and indeed with other stakeholders. We want to continue to collaborate with you in the work that you do. And the theme of today's event "discover the gold of human potential" certainly speaks too many of us. If anything I am here to support this initiative and embrace projects for skills development.

If we are talking about mining human potential I think I have some powers as an ex- Minister of Minerals and Energy to offer you a licence to do exploration, to make sure that you prospect, mine and beneficiate all of the mineral wealth that you are going to mine. It is important to highlight that the majority of people and the majority of mineral wealth that is still to be discovered in South Africa, and the people who need to be mined right now, have 12 years of school experience or less. They are young, they are able bodied, they want to work but if you don't explore, prospect, mine and beneficiate them, they will reach the age of 40 without ever having worked and that is a big scandal for the country.

While on one end, we have a responsibility to work and invest in the high-end of the skills continuum, we have to work together to make sure that the almost six million young people in South Africa who are not likely to get a job are supported; not unless you come with developmental programmes like the Hope Factory, Thuthuka Bursary Fund. All of those people depend on you to give them a break in life.

At the same time we are doing it to make sure that we produce the Chartered Accountants that the country needs. There is room for us at this point to reflect on the achievements of the past year and of course to commit to the plans ahead. In the Joint Initiative of Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA), a component of Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa (AsgiSA) we have decided that skills are probably one of the biggest binding constraints to accelerating the growth of our economy and to sharing it. Yes, our economy is growing right now at an impressing rate, yes we are creating jobs but we are unable to create jobs at a pace at which we need to be creating them.

We have a challenge to create jobs at all levels. At an entry level, those who are unskilled need jobs too and to work to learn. Those who are new on their jobs need experience and those who are experienced need to excel. So this is a busy country, at all levels we have some work to do. There is a great obligation to mentor and to make sure that each one teaches one, and there are programmes to enable us to do that.

We live in interesting times and indeed there is room for hope because as we speak about sharing the growth, we are talking about the economy that is growing and, therefore, that allows us this little room to grow. In fact, these days I am not so worried about whether the economy will grow, what keeps me awake at night is whether we will share the growth and this is a much more difficult task.

The President said also in the State of the Nation (SoNA), we have seen an increase in our investment especially driven by public sector infrastructure spending, which has increased by an annual average of 15,8%. That means that there is a demand in the economy for engineers, project managers, artisans, for Chief Financial Officer (CFOs), for brokers and indeed for the many skills that we need.

But how do we make sure that as we take advantage of this growth we also pay attention to the sharing aspect. Many of our young people today, who would have gone to school in the main in the schools that are still very much challenged when it comes to the quality of learning, need a helping hand to make it.

In South Africa today, we have made significant progress and we have reached almost 100% when it comes to access to education by all children of school going age. The challenge is now to improve the quality of the education that they are getting there and to make sure that they do not drop out, because if they drop out, in grades 8 or 9, the investment that we would have made up till that point is actually lost. Because it is that critical level at which one would then have moved forward and it would be possible to invest so that one is able to enhance the human capital.

The Department of Education has committed itself to a campaign in which you can all participate which is an adopt-a-school-campaign. This is where we are trying to get every school in the country to be adopted by somebody who can work with the school to make sure that the school meets its basic needs of teaching and learning and the provision of basic facilities.

The Minister of Education will soon be tabling legislation in parliament to define what a school is; because notwithstanding that in South Africa we built many classrooms we do not have enough schools. A classroom is not necessarily a school we want to make sure that every school has sanitation facilities, water, electricity and these days Information Communication and Technology (ICT) infrastructure, laboratories etcetera. We would have to prescribe what a school is minimally and we hope that we can mobilise as many people as possible throughout the country to work with us to make sure that every school in South Africa meets that minimum threshold.

I think of interest to yourselves as well, we want to run a campaign to make sure that more students and schools, ensure that students would write their mathematics examinations in higher grade as against to standard grade and we would like to incentives them with cash. Every school that produces a student that passes in higher grades gets cash about a R1 000 per passed student, to reinvest in the schools' capacity to teach better. And they must also invest in the capacity and the development of their teaching staff to provide a better service. This is one of the activities that our Minister of Education will be launching soon.

I want to congratulate you for the many initiatives that you have; the development of entrepreneurs, Thuthuka project, Thuthuka Bursary Fund and others. I would like to recommend that for the Hope Factory, you please work with us to bring on board the people in the Hope Factory in the supplier list of companies that you can for some the memorabilia that we will need for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

On Tuesday, 19 June 2007, we are going to start with that work and I will arrange with someone from the Department of Trade and Industry to go and visit the factory and be able to brief them so that they can come on board as one of the service providers and we will make sure that we allow them the freedom to do as much as they can without doing any ambush marketing and risking facing the wrath of FIFA.

We want to play in the space where people can produce en masse without having to be worrying about all of the intellectual properties challenges because there is a lot of scope outside that. Further I would like us to partner in the Thuthuka projects because we also in JIPSA would like to invest and in fact are investing in the facilitation of young graduates into the world of work. I have been told that, in the market, Thuthuka is one of the best projects, so I would like to rub shoulders with Thuthuka.

In the first year of JIPSA, we have been able to place 4 000 students with different companies and in my view this is a small number for our context. I would like your help for us to significantly increase the number this year of the young people that we can place in South African companies.

We have placed 760 internationally and we do have quite a big pipeline of those we are still looking into in order for us to be able to post them to different parts of the world. In the auditing industry I do want to, at the risk of creating a sibling jealousy, to single out KPMG for excellent contribution that they have made in JIPSA, the placement of 20 young women who will soon be finishing a year with them.

I have been told that all of them are doing exceptionally well and they have a bright future in the industry and many of those were young women who beside their certificate had very little to show and KPMG risked and took them on board and they are looking for more. So I would like to urge other companies to follow in their foot steps.

In the placement that we have done internationally, we have focused indeed in your sector, we have placed students in the financial sector, we have placed students in the built environment, engineers and related skills, we have placed in ICT and we have also placed them in hospitality and tourism sectors.

As we speak we have almost a 100 in India, we have just dispatched 20 into a prestigious school in France to do advanced project management and all of them had had to have an engineering background and a few years of work experience. It was a very competitive process and I am glad that we have got 20 and it is a fairly representative group in terms of race and gender.

We will be taking up to 500 in that programme by the time we have completed our agreement with our partners Areva; they will do a year of academic training and a year of practice mainly in the energy industry in anticipation of our big energy construction programme. We are also going to be looking for many young people and that is why we want to work with Thuthuka, in the banking sector in general and we have a couple of offers there and we would like to share those with you.

I do want to talk to us as South Africans. We are preparing to host this very big event for South Africa and for the continent. We a grappling with negative unfounded publicity in this regard and I would like to urge you to help us drive the message that we are on schedule in terms of our commitment of the building of stadiums. We will have all the stadia ready in time by 2009 for the Confederations Cup.

In conclusion, the skills shortage in this country demands swift action. To address this gap has to be one of our important goals. SAICA represents the stem from which many branches, leaves and fruits must grow.

I thank you.

Issued by: The Presidency
16 May 2007