The long-awaited National Skills Strategy (NSS) to deal with the serious skills dearth and high unemployment rate in South Africa will be handed to Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana for approval next week.
The draft plan is being finalised and if adopted the NSS will be launched on February 22 at a national skills development conference in Johannesburg, says Sam Moratoba, executive officer of the National Skills Authority.
The NSS will guide skills activity for the next four years but the objectives will be renewed yearly, he says. Some of the bedrock issues in the development of the NSS include the country’s high unemployment level (40%), the low skills level, the retraining of the 10-million-strong workforce and the lack of race and gender equity in the workplace.
The skills shortage in South Africa is reflected in the fact that only 20% (or three million) of our economically active population is skilled or highly skilled, while about 80% (12-million) is semi-skilled, unskilled or unemployed.
The NSS will also take into account realities from the recently released Employment Equity Register, where Mdladlana lambasted employers for not taking labour laws seriously enough. One of the disturbing facts that emerged from the register was that white males continue to dominate senior rungs of the workplace, with blacks and women trailing far behind.
Employment equity reports also showed that only 28% of black people are in senior management positions. The figure in 1998 was 27,8%, indicating that little progress had been made.
Moratoba says that the focus of the NSS is to encourage high-quality learning and accreditation of qualifications and quality assurance in terms of the South African Qualifications Authority (Saqa).
It will also target employee and employer learning within industries and “people development” or the upgrading of skills for the unemployed so that they gain access to the labour market.
In addition, the national skills strategy will ensure that education and training take place in small and medium enterprises, he says. So far the labour ministry has established 25 sector education training authorities, five of which mining, tourism, education, wholesale and retail and financial are now fully fledged after being accredited by Saqa.
However, for business there are shortcomings in the NSS. Andre Dippenaar of Business South Africa says that the emphasis for labour and business is different. Business is of the view that economic growth will lead to job creation and that more incentive schemes should be introduced to encourage foreign investment in the country, and the cost of labour be brought down. He says that the plan “needs more importance attached to small and medium businesses that will foster economic growth”.
Dippenaar said there is a need for less centralised control by the state and less reliance on national projects in favour of a switch to more “flexibility and relevance”. For instance, money could be used from the skills development fund at the lowest possible level, for example, training of an artisan in mining. Such an approach will coincide with the needs of the country, he says, instead of attaching too high a priority to the creation of jobs in public works programmes.