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Cape Town - The sector education and training authorities (Setas) should be scrapped and replaced with a tax rebate scheme for skills development by employers, the Democratic Alliance said on Monday.
The shortage of skilled labour across South African industry had emerged as a significant and increasing problem in recent years, DA spokesperson Anchen Dreyer told a media briefing at Parliament.
Research into the country's labour market had shown that about 44 percent of unemployed South Africans could not find a job because they did not have the skills or the qualifications employers sought.
At the same time, it was estimated that there were half a million vacant positions that could not be filled because people with the right skills could not be found.
The Setas had been government's principal strategy to address this issue.
However, many problems had emerged over the years, with many Setas bogged down by massive corruption and few having produced concrete results.
"Although many billions of rands have been pumped into Setas over the past seven years - at least R4.6bn was received by 22 of the 23 Setas in 2006/07 alone - they have yet to show they are capable of producing people with the skills that our economy needs, or of fulfilling the promises that have been made to the young South Africans who have placed their hopes for the future in these training programmes," Dreyer said.
While enormous resources had been pumped into Setas, there was no proper record of critical information of their success held either by the responsible ministry or the Setas themselves.
It was clear from a DA analysis that the Seta system was completely failing to respond to the needs of the market.
"A system whereby the authorities responsible for creating and implementing training programmes have no interest in the outcomes is clearly not working.
"The DA calls for a clean slate in skills development and a scrapping of the Setas approach.
"We believe that industry badly needs a training system that is demand-driven; hence we reiterate the need to implement a system of tax rebates for skills development efforts by employers."
If adopted, this system would lead to a highly-adaptive and efficient skills development system, as industry was best placed to respond to trends and needs, Dreyer said.
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Sapa