Sue Blaine
30 April 2009
Johannesburg — PUBLIC hearings on proposed changes in the sectoral education and training authority (Seta) sector are set for June, National Skills Authority (NSA) vice-chairman Vusi Mabena said yesterday.
SA's Seta system remains controversial and the Setas are routinely criticised for underspending their considerable revenue.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has long argued that the Seta system should be scrapped as it is largely dysfunctional, and last year the African National Congress (ANC) turned on its own creation when its treasurer-general Matthews Phosa said "most of the Setas are a disaster".
While change in the Seta system is almost inevitable, Mabena said the NSA would be looking to impose "minimum disruption and maximum improvement".
DA labour spokeswoman Anchen Dreyer said the DA was open to taking another look at the Seta system and perhaps changing its "scrap it" tune, but this would only happen when there was evidence the Setas were reforming.
The Department of Labour and an NSA subcommittee have received the 23 Setas' applications for recertification, a statutory requirement they have to fulfil every five years.
Although the NSA subcommittee set up to design a new Seta system, which next meets in mid-May, had yet to debate the applications, it had asked a consultant to design broad principles it would use to decide what the new Seta "landscape" would look like, Mabena said. The subcommittee wanted to improve the Setas' reach and would also look at each Seta's performance and at the substance of their recertification applications. Unviable and poorly performing Setas would be intensively scrutinised .
"Then we will propose a (new Seta) landscape, and wait for the Setas, and public comment," he said.
SA started off with 25 Setas when the system was introduced in 2000, and has already gone through one recertification process, which had Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana announce the merging of some of the first crop of Setas to give SA 23 Setas from March 2004. The government is expected to announce the new landscape in March next year.
The ANC has in the past proposed the idea of scrapping the 23 Setas and replacing them with five groups based on the five economic sector clusters pinpointed in the national industrial policy framework.
In January last year it was reported the Setas had failed to spend R600m of their annual R5bn budget and by September only 8715 of 40000 learners had been trained.
A group of Harvard academics, advising the government, proposed last year that more Setas be established, while the University of Cape Town's Development Research Unit has argued for bolstering existing Setas to improve performance.
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