New Era

JOHANNESBURG - Affirmative action cannot be blamed for South Africa's skills shortage, ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe said yesterday.

"This country is running so short of skills. If you blame affirmative action you are barking up the wrong tree," Mantashe told a media briefing in Johannesburg.

He said if there were a high number of vacancies such as for an engineer at a municipality, a position would not just be left empty because it did not comply with affirmative action.

Speaking after a meeting with the business organisation Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut (AHI), Mantashe said linking the two issues was polarising the debate.

"We need to shift the focus [to] real issues - that there is a chronic shortage of skills, and we need to accelerate [gaining these skills]."

Mantashe said in order to continue meeting affirmative action targets, mentorship and coaching should take place when a retired engineer could, for example, be partnered with a newly qualified one.

"It takes time and therefore you partner these people and are actually getting skills into the economy."

Eventually the skills issue becomes neither black nor white, Mantashe said.

AHI CEO Stef Coetzee said the organisation had many skilled people who could help provincial and local governments.

"We have business people, engineers, financial skills, economic development; a broad range available to bring to the table."

Coetzee said the AHI could contribute to the management of water issues in the country, by providing people who could help get pollution out the water.

Provincial and local government minister Sicelo Shiceka said a meeting on the water situation would take place by tomorrow or Monday.

"We will be meeting sooner ... with a high-profile team to look at spillage in the wake of dealing with the crisis now and also where the crisis is looming; to ensure our water is safe from raw sewage," he said.
Speaking about land reform, Mantashe said it was a national concern.

"I don't think that land and agrarian reform is an Afrikaner issue. It is a South African issue. Therefore it should be handled as a national issue rather than a sectional issue."

He said the key to handling the matter correctly was in both "dealing with the fears coming from whites, which are real and the aspirations of blacks, which are also real".

Coetzee said many people were willing to co-operate with the land reform processes. He said a lot of small towns depended on agriculture and so the AHI had an interest in having good land reform progress and in keeping agricultural production at a high level.

"South Africa is the one country where land reform should be successful."

Coetzee also said the AHI would also promote the role small businesses could play in the economy. "There is a high fallout of small black entrepreneurs. How can we support them?"

Supporting small business meant, "that the real economy can turn around in the micro sense as well".

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