Speaker, a survey by Productivity SA in 2008 revealed that South Africa has the world's highest brain drain and the worst skills shortage of the 55 countries surveyed. In the consolidated general report on the local government audit outcomes for 2008 to 2009 published recently, the Auditor-General gave reasons why remedial action was not taken by municipalities on audit outcomes of previous years. These reasons include: "Failure by the leadership to adequately deal with the level of vacancies and instability at senior leadership level" and "Ineffective recruitment, training and supervision of finance staff".
The skills shortage crisis in local government is, to my mind, one of the main reasons for nondelivery by municipalities. For instance, since the first democratic local government elections in December 2000, the number of civil engineering professionals in the local government sphere were reduced from 2 500 plus to less than 1 300, the capacity effectively being halved within the past 10 years.
Here, I must remind you that between 1994 and 2000 no capacity was lost, and it went well in local government because of shared, responsible transformation, but the moment the ANC alone got their hands on the levers of power at municipalities, capacity imploded just as dramatically as the Cape Town power station towers two weeks ago. Dit is 'n gemene saak dat apartheid-onderwys die oorgrote meerderheid van ons bevolking met swak onderwys en min geleenthede vir verdere opleiding gelaat het. Dit is 'n groot bydraende faktor dat die ekonomie vandag vaardigheidstekorte ondervind. Alhoewel die toegang tot onderwys die afgelope twee dekades verbeter het, het die gehalte ongelukkig nie verbeter nie. Munisipaliteite word deesdae genoodsaak om nuwe werksoekers aan te stel wat net eenvoudig nie oor die basiese vaardighede beskik nie. (Translation of Afrikaans paragraph follows.)
[It is common knowledge that apartheid education left the majority of our population with poor education and few opportunities for further training. It is an important contributing factor to skills shortages in our present- day economy. Although access to education has improved over the past two decades, the quality, unfortunately, did not improve. Municipalities are forced nowadays to appoint new job seekers who simply do not have the basic skills at all.]
However, cadre deployment at ANC-controlled municipalities has been the biggest culprit that has robbed local government of skilled people. The first step in cadre deployment is, of course, to get positions vacant. In the few years that the ANC controlled the Cape Town metro, 84 senior managers were given nice packages with the ratepayers' money. This was a trend all over South Africa. In the process, some highly talented people who could have fulfilled at least a caretaker role and could have assisted with in-house training were dismissed. [Interjections.] The ANC - listen, Minister - alienated so many professionals ...