Lucky few can still feed in a sea of job offerings
October 1, 2009
Job losses in South Africa, like elsewhere in the world, have been heavy. But a closer look at the job market locally shows there are still some opportunities. These, however, are for the lucky few that have the skills that companies need.
According to the Adcorp Employment Index, which was released this week, the sectors that need skills the most are in the manufacturing of transport equipment, other than motor and motor accessory manufacturing. Food and beverage makers also need trained staff, as do high-end communication device makers and some areas of the chemicals industry.
But for most South Africans that have had the misfortune of being educated by the state schooling system these opportunities will be out of reach.
The number of students who fail to finish school is high. The Department of Education this month said the drop-out rate stood at 50 percent. Adcorp's research puts it at 60 percent.
It gets worse: According to the National Benchmark Test project - which was released recently after being commissioned in 2005 to assess entry-level university students' proficiency in maths and literacy - of the more than 10 000 who wrote the maths test, only 738 students were found to be proficient in the subject. Only a quarter of them were quantatively literate and fewer than half have the academic literacy to succeed without support.
Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan recently acknowledged that the massive investments in education, among other things, had not reaped the desired results.
The focus now is on ensuring that money allocated to education, for example, is spent on employing more people to deliver the service of teaching rather than to do administrative work.
A renewed focus on teaching should help those still in school, although the jury is still out on that. But what about those who have spent wasted years in the system and have little to show for it?
All-out confrontation
Are we seeing the same faces again at the forefront of the clash between the National African Chamber of Commerce (Nafcoc) and its investment arm Nafhold?
Close observers of this perennial confrontation may be pardoned if they yawn with déj224 vu: it is the election year for the Nafcoc office bearers and it is the year of the national conference. In such a year, the observers have come to understand that anything is possible within the chamber.
Apart from demanding the board chairman and chief executive to resign, the members say Nafhold has neither held an annual general meeting nor produced annual financial statements.
However, the deeper cry is that Nafhold's shareholders - the trusts and structures - have not benefited from any assets that were sold and the demand is that these be paid in full annually.
But one must hasten to add that Michael Leaf , the Nafhold chief executive, is being hoist on his own petard.
In October 2007 - at a Nafcoc conference - he said that at least 10 000 members of the chamber would have shares worth R480 million when 40 percent of the investment company would be in their hands.
The clear-thinking Leaf even announced various categories that would be put in place to select members who would benefit from this opportunity.
The groups would include anyone who had been a Nafcoc member for 20 years and longer; anyone who was serving on the national council or had served on it; present and past presidents; trustees; staff who had been with the organisation for longer than four years; and present and past executive members.
A portion of these shares would consist of at least 500 shares per member, which would be worth R20 000. The allocation seemed to have been well-thought out. What then is delaying the execution?
Taking orders
Bobby Godsell, the former AngloGold Ashanti chief executive, says he was approached by former public enterprises minister Alec Erwin and ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe to take on the job of chairman of Eskom. "I was asked to do it," he told a businessman at the Cape Town Club who asked why he had joined the troubled entity.
He admitted it was, indeed, quite odd to appoint "a white male" who was also not aligned with the ruling party. It either was an act of national reconciliation or national madness. If he had been given a psychometric test, he probably would not have been given the job, he quipped.
Godsell was candid about the strengths and weaknesses of the organisation. He believed the entity was doing a pretty good job of running its coal-fired power stations although five had run down to low-coal levels last year. Stocks were now at about 40 days, up from about four days in some instances.
Reacting to the crisis of last year - where the mining industry had been shut down for only the second time in the country's history, the first time being during the Anglo Boer war - he said that about 2 000 staff had been brought in to "keep the lights on". Many of those were "light pigmentation people" who had carried out restocking and maintenance.
After 2004, the entity had ended an eight-year period in which no power stations were built and began building the Medupi coal-fired station in Limpopo, the Kusile coal-fired station in Mpumalanga and a peaking station in the Drakensberg.
The intention was to add about 18 000 megawatts to the current output of about 40 000MW. These three projects were costing the entity R385 billion.
"It is absolutely massive, it is eight times the size of Gautrain, 10 times the expenditure of the World Cup," he said.
Deflecting a question about whether the power generation should be in state hands, he acknowledged that governments "all over the world love to control things, but don't like to pay (for) things".
Edited by Peter DeIonno. With contributions by Samantha Enslin-Payne, Wiseman Khuzwayo and Donwald Pressly.
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