A total of 3 733 vacancies in South African government departments existed as at May 26, said Public Service and Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi on Tuesday.
Replying to a question in Parliament from New National Party (NNP) member of Parliament (MP) Dirk Bakker, the minister said that there never was a general moratorium on the filling of vacancies. Instead the moratorium was limited to the advertisement of posts outside of the public service.
”This was done to enable individual employees who could not be placed within their departments to be redeployed to other departments,” she noted, without elaborating further.
She noted that most of the vacancies were in the Mpumalanga education department (a total of 1917), followed by the transport department in KwaZulu Natal at 954. There were 225 openings in the housing department in KwaZulu-Natal and 186 in that province’s agriculture department.
In Gauteng there were 246 vacancies in the social services and population development department.
In national departments there were 94 vacancies in the environment and tourism department and just 17 in the science and technology department. There were only a handful of vacancies in various other national departments. – I-Net Bridge