Deputy Speaker, hon members, the Bill before Parliament today aims to transfer the responsibility for FET colleges from provinces to the Department of Higher Education and Training.
South Africa suffers from a skills shortage of epic proportions. We acknowledge that FET colleges have not been utilised effectively to address our country's skills shortage. Although the UDM has serious reservations about the transfer of FET colleges from provinces to the national Department of Higher Education and Training, given the challenges centralisation always creates and the fact that FET colleges will be better served in the Department of Basic Education, we would like to give the government the benefit of the doubt.
This doubt arises from the fact that in some of the FET colleges we observed that more time was given to theory than to practical work, especially with people who wanted to be artisans. People who came through such colleges could define concepts in highfalutin English, but they could not produce what we expected them to produce. So, we want people from these colleges to come out with more saleable skills and not just with definitions of concepts. The UDM supports the Bill.