Too many vacancies in mining sector
Brendan Ryan
Posted: Fri, 11 Apr 2008
miningmx.com
[miningmx.com] -- SOUTH AFRICA'S SKILLS CRISIS was highlighted by Exxaro CEO Sipho Nkosi, who called for a concerted effort by the public and private sectors to deal with it.
Earlier this year, Impala Platinum CEO David Brown described South Africa's skills crisis as the greatest challenge facing the country.
Nkosi is also currently president of the Chamber of Mines. His comments - made at a debate linked to the release of Exxaro's latest annual report - come at a time when anecdotal evidence indicates a resurgence of emigration of skilled workers and executives from South Africa.
Exxaro - one of South Africa's largest resources groups - is also suffering due to poaching of its skilled workers by local competitors. Staff at its massive Grootegeluk coalmine in Limpopo Province were recently being specifically headhunted by a foreign company, while Exxaro lost 345 skilled technical employees in the year to February - equivalent to 18% of that category of employee.
That really irritates Nkosi, as Exxaro is spending far more heavily on the training and education of workers than many of its competitors. He pointed out that engineering students employed by Exxaro constitute 24,5% of the total prospective engineers registered at the Mining Qualifications Authority (MQA), while Exxaro's ratio of students to qualified artisans is 1:2 compared with an industry ratio of around 1:40.
One of the reasons for that - highlighted in the debate by Business Unity SA COO Vic van Vuuren - was the prior actions of major employers, such as Transnet (for which he worked at the time) to chop back on learnerships.
"The feeling was that management didn't see the point of incurring the costs of training people for everybody else. Hopefully, all those training facilities are now being taken out of mothballs," he said.
Chamber of Mines skills development adviser Vusi Mabena added: "That was one of the prices the country paid for the commercialisation of its public corporations. One of their big responsibilities was to train people. They stopped doing it because Government wanted them to make a profit."
Nkosi says migration was a "global challenge" and called on South Africa to "decrease push factors and increase pull factors to South Africa for the economically active population. As a country we have to create the right climate for people to want to work here. Otherwise we train them and they go."
One example given to illustrate the competition that "South Africa Inc" faced to retain its skills was that of third-year veterinary students at Onderstepoort already being approached with offers of New Zealand citizenship.
Nkosi also called for more efforts to make stakeholder partnerships deliver, such as the Setas (sector education and training authority) and JIPSA (joint initiative for priority skills acquisition).
But Mabena was highly critical of the bureaucratic structures that had been created so far to tackle education and training. He told the meeting: "We sit with a bureaucratic system in this country which is so bad that it's frustrating the bureaucrats themselves. Government is saying that it wants to deliver but it's created a system that doesn't allow the delivery. The problems we're encountering with the MQA and the NSF (National Skills Fund) aren't really their fault. It's the way the system works."
Former Exxaro CEO (and former Chamber of Mines president) Con Fauconnier was also highly critical of the bureaucracy and the inertia it created. "Five years ago we were telling Government we needed to do something about this and five years later nothing has happened. We seem to have a national trait that talks a subject to death but does nothing about it.
"One of the results is that 20 years ago we had 30,000 learnerships versus about 3,500 today. I have this frustration with how you get things to work."
In previous years - when still Exxaro CEO - Fauconnier has sounded off on the length of time taken by organisations such as Transnet to reach decisions on projects like the expansion of rail and port infrastructure required to increase South Africa's exports of iron ore and coal.
Final word from Exxaro coal GM Ernst Venter - responsible for the Grootegeluk colliery, which currently supplies Eskom's Matimba power station and will supply Eskom's Medupi station now under construction - was that "this is an SA Inc problem and we must collaborate with Government to build a case for change". |
