Programme Director, Professor Brimer
The Principal, Doctor YM Karodia
Members of the Board of Governors
Principal of Regent Business School, Professor Bhana
Principal of Mancosa Mauritius, Doctor Jaumally
Mancosa Management
Staff and students of Mancosa
Ladies and gentlemen

I feel very much honoured to be invited yet again and to share with you this exciting moment, marking the successful completion of part of a lifelong journey to acquire skills and knowledge to develop our society and our economy. Achievement of any national qualification brings a great sense of fulfilment to the achiever, particularly when that achievement is related to an occupation, as is the case with the Certificate in Management studies, the Master of Business Administration (MBA) and Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) that are to be conferred today.

I want to extend my congratulations and appreciation to the men and women of this country who have endured in some instances up to three years of study, in order to accomplish their mission. I know how difficult it is to be a student while you are expected to successfully deal with work assignments, and also meet family responsibilities at the same time. This is the unfortunate reality that most of us adult South Africans find ourselves in, and this being because of our past, the social inequalities that continue to exist, the high cost of higher education and the need to catch up with the latest developments and trends.

I will refrain from delivering a lecture on the serious skills disparity levels amongst our people that continue to impact or hinder them from participating effectively in the social and economic mainstream of our country. I will not bore you with statistics on youth unemployment including graduates from Further Education Trainings and Universities who are slowly losing hope, and are a potential time bomb that is about to explode unless we provide access to further learning and employment opportunities.

Skills shortage debate:

A day hardly goes by without talk or story on the serious skills shortages that this country is experiencing and how does this impact on our abilities to deliver services or meet the demands of our growing economy. Emerging experts and analysts in the Human Resources Development field have put the blame squarely on Sector Education and Training Authorities (Setas) and their inability to rise to the occasion to meet the skills challenges, some are blaming the curriculum and career offerings in our schooling system, Further Education and Training (FET) and universities, some suggest that I am the cause of the problem by fighting or not talking to the Minister of Education. Others have argued that there is no National Human Resources Development Co-ordination and Planning in the country.

In some instances, the Employment Equity and Black Economic Empowerment Acts are fingered, some argue that crime is the main reason driving skilled people out of the country, some blame the inability of our workplaces to plan for future skills needs, others have cited the continued existence of racism in the workplace, while others blame inflexibility in Immigration Regulations or Labour laws. There's also a view that we should leave everything to the free market.

In the process, new definitions such as priority skills, growth skills, and critical skills and so on have emerged and added to the confusion. What else? Do you remember the animal farm story? I am sure there are other reasons that you have in this Hall.

I have listened to these debates with interest. The more people talk and engage in these debates, the more I realise how complex the skills shortage debate has become. It has begun to mean different things to different people and once we reach that point, there won't be easy solutions to this challenge.

Defining 'scarce' and 'critical' skills

Within the context of our National Skills Development Strategy, we took some time to try and examine the concept of skills shortage in order to firstly demystify some of the myths, and to understand exactly what people are saying. We have also attempted to clarify the meaning of some of the terminologies in order to respond accordingly.

We defined Scarce and Critical skills to refer to "an absolute or relative demand: current or in future; for skilled; qualified and experienced people to fill particular roles / professions, occupations or specialisations in the labour market. We also chose occupation or qualification as a measure as both have the merit of being relatively straightforward to measure and readily understood.

We defined 'critical' skills to refer to particular capabilities needed within an occupation, for example, general management skills, communication and customer handling skills, teamwork skills, and communication technology skills.

We also differentiated between absolute and relative scarcity of skills.

Absolute scarcity refers to suitably skilled people who are not available in the labour market and may include new or emerging occupation, lack of suitably qualified people or insufficient numbers of people enrolled in programmes to meet the new demands.

We also defined relative scarcity in the context of suitably skilled people available in the labour market but who may not necessarily have high level of work experience, may not be located within a specific geographical location and equity considerations.

It is within the context of these definitions that we can as a country begin to develop appropriate strategies to deal with specific problems. Importation of skills is a temporary measure. It may sound attractive but is not sustainable in the long term.

National Master Scarce Skills list

We have published a National Master Scarce Skills List for South Africa. Annually we conduct an up-load process and we also publish an Annual State of Skills publication and both publications are also available on our website.

The list is aimed at providing a comprehensive account of the skills that lie at the heart of the "binding constraint" on economic growth and development, in other words, the skills that are most needed in our country and on which we need to focus our efforts on acquiring and developing.

The National Master Scarce Skills List brings together a number of labour market demand side identification processes and represents a growing coherence across government and economic sector actors in identifying and forecasting skills demand. We draw relevant data from Seta Sector Skills Plans, from various government departments and complement the information with commissioned sectoral research studies.

The Department of Home Affairs uses this list to develop the current Work Permit Quota List that they publish annually. The scarce skills information and mechanisms for identifying scarcity have been improved through the experience and lessons learnt during the development of the first list. The list was adopted by the Accelerated Shared Growth in South Africa's Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition as the AsgiSA Master Skills list. We will continue to improve on this process to ensure that the scarce skills signalling processes and data are substantively updated, reliable and serve their sectoral and national purposes.

We are also following closely on the international debates and trends regarding skills projections or focusing models. We are also trying our outmost to align our skills development interventions with the National Industrial Policy Framework, Provincial Growth and Development Strategies, Local Economic Development Plans in order to maximise placement opportunities for graduates of our programmes.

Higher Education contribution towards National Scarce and Critical skills needs

I believe that it is critical that we forge and develop very strong partnerships between Setas, FETs and Higher Education in order to meet current skills demands and to address future socio, economic and individual aspirations. Finger pointing and philosophical arguments around the distinct role of higher education are not going to take us anywhere. I am pleased to hear that Mancosa has already established partnerships with local government structures because that is where most of the management skills are needed. It makes me happy to note that Mancosa is also involved in the training of informal traders. Globalisation is intensifying and more and more people are falling into the informal sector.

Globalisation, as Stiglitz correctly asserts, is driven by Bretton Woods Institutions with a strong neo-liberal ideological learning which emphasises the need for flexibility of Labour markets. This does not only lead to the erosion of the standard employment relationships, but also leads to the emergence of a new class of workers, with little or no protection, no employment security, and no benefits at all.

In the document for the South African Communist Party Congress, they referred to this trend as "camouflaged privatisation", which is happening through outsourcing and labour brokerage. In the same document, they further indicated that the restructuring of the working class has led to stratification and fractionalisation into the formal, "permanent" strata, the informalised and the marginalised.

Your training therefore of the informal traders is a major contribution to this sector. I hope and pray that the training you give will change the attitude of the employers in the informal sector towards their workers. I am saying this knowing that sometimes in training traders, whether formal or informal, we concentrate on how they must maximise profit and forget the management of working people in the sector. Human rights are not informal but formal and are formally enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.

The National Scare Skills List provides the Department of Labour and its statutory skills development intermediaries with a set of indicators for skills development interventions. It may not be the best ever available model. It is therefore important, especially amongst institutions of higher learning, that you assist us in developing another alternative instrument if you believe that the current one is flawed, something that we can use collectively to address our future skills needs.

The national scarce skills list if properly used could provide the schooling system, FET and higher education institutions with a set of indicators for course development and career guidance that should be provided to learners and communities. We need to also address other aspects such as access, discrimination, and recognition of prior learning, high fee costs, scope of programmes, and the pace at which we introduce adjustments in order to meet the fast changing technological and global competition and so on.

We have spent the last four years reviewing the National Qualifications Framework and negotiating the best possible framework to maintain standards, quality assurance, synergy within the education and skills development system.

We have agreed on the third Quality Assurance Council beyond Umalusi and the Quality Council for Occupations and Trades, to develop a coherent framework to recognise learning taking place in the work place. We have since tabled a Joint Policy statement on National Qualifications Framework to Cabinet and we will be tabling the necessary proposed legislative amendments to give effect to the policy statement. I hope universities will embrace the framework and ensure seamless and good working relations amongst the three Quality Assurance Councils.

Mancosa

To the Mancosa management team and the governing Board, thank you once again for inviting me. I am very proud to be associated with those who are keen to acknowledge that there is a problem of scarce and critical skills that we are facing as a country, those who are willing to acknowledge that the country had past practices that were unjust and wrong and are determined to correct that. I am not ashamed to be associated with both public and private higher education institutions that are keen and willing to provide good quality education and skills development. I am willing to talk to those who are prepared to transcend the tradition and entrenched privileges of higher education and keen to assist us in addressing the current national challenges that we face.

I will support those who are prepared to work very closely with the labour market players to ensure that their programmes are responsive and relevant to our social and economic demands while at the same time fulfilling individual aspirations.

I want to thank the Mancosa team, for your tireless efforts, in continuing to work with local communities to help them develop local solutions, and for maintaining a close working relationship with Commerce and Industry in your programmes.

Graduates

To our very important guests about to receive your certificates and degrees today, I hope that with the management skills and learning that you have acquired, you will assist us to build a very strong economy and stable country. You will provide strong leadership that is grounded in a sound ethical foundation. As you become a celebrity and most importantly, once you receive that huge pay packet, the big house and the big car, and when you enter the industry and start using terminology such as down-sizing, right-sizing, streamlining, de-staffing etc. Please do not forget where we come from.

As a new generation of managers, I hope you will play a major role in transforming the world of work environment into a social and cultural phenomenon as well as a place in which people exercise their skills to assist you to meet targets and maximum productivity levels.

Congratulations on your achievement and you all deserve a huge applause.

I thank you.