Unless we fix South Africa’s human infrastructure we are going to crash

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South Africa is feeling the effect of load-shedding, shrinking commuter rail services and unreliable freight services. It has become clear that when the state of public infrastructure does not keep pace with the size and evolving needs of the country, the economy suffers. 

Alexander Forbes’ chief economist, Isaah Mhlanga, estimates that the economy loses R4 billion each day that Eskom implements stage six load-shedding. These losses are staggering and come at a time when we cannot afford them.

Nevertheless, the effects of load-shedding have accelerated the adoption of policy positions on renewable energy and independent power production (IPP). The need for a partnership between the private and public sectors to design and roll out innovative solutions to acute power shortages, has gone from a remote possibility to a necessity on the road to implementation. 

There are no guarantees that this will be enough to turn the tide. But the level of national involvement at least creates an opportunity to build a turnaround strategy and work towards a solution.

Herein lies the concern. Although we are seeing a national dialogue on the state of public infrastructure, the discussion on the paltry state of our skills level is a muted conversation. We are experiencing a skills crisis that is as catastrophic and urgent as the public infrastructure crisis, and yet it mostly goes unnoticed.

In June, Blade Nzimande, the minister of higher education, science and innovation, stated that only 12% of learners that enter grade one move on to university and only 4% will graduate with a university degree. The effect of this leaky pipeline can be seen in the Critical Skills List Gazetted by the ministry of home affairs in August. 

A review of this list shows a shortage of skilled practitioners with science, technology, engineering and maths qualifications. If we are successful in averting the public infrastructure crisis, how long can we sustain that victory if we do not have a plan in place to ensure that we have the human capital to maintain and evolve the infrastructure in the future?

Our economic productivity is significantly curtailed by the shortcomings in our public infrastructure. In the short term, we lose billions of rands as we fail to deliver goods and services to a market. In the long term, our past failures to deliver will hurt our credibility and close up opportunities, as potential buyers of our goods and services look to more dependable providers.

Likewise, the cost of unoptimised education funding is high unemployment and millions of citizens precluded from economic participation because their skills are not relevant. Further, this exacerbates the public infrastructure crisis because we fail to build the competence to sustain the changing economic landscape and maintain economic growth.

In 2021, the World Bank estimated South Africa’s GDP per capita as $13.126 compared to a GDP per person employed of $52.328. At the time that these estimates were produced, Statistics South Africa reported an unemployment rate of 34%. Growing the proportion of the population that is economically active would create significant opportunities for economic growth. When we consider the digital skills shortage, those growth opportunities are available. 

In 2020, Harambee’s report on the Mapping of Digital and ICT roles estimated that there would be at least 40 000 entry-level jobs added annually. Juxtapose this with the department of higher education and trainings’ estimates that traditional universities graduate 2 900 computer science graduates each year. As a consequence of this undersupply, many of these entry-level digital jobs either go unfilled or are sent overseas to countries like India and Poland.

The intention of adding the skills shortage to the growing list of national crises is not to create yet another cause for panic and despair. Rather, the goal is to prioritise it among the major national problems that require urgent attention and innovative solutions.

Similar to addressing the electricity shortage through partnerships with IPP, we need to identify working education models and curricula that are delivering quality training outcomes in the private sector and scale them up through partnerships with the public sector. Parallel to this we must adopt new pathways and pedagogies for learning that allow us to ramp up the number of young people that can be successfully equipped with economically relevant skills.

Through these shifts, we can transform the state of our skills pipeline. Discipline in policy formulation and execution with coordinated action between the private and public sectors will enable us to build an education and skills development infrastructure that will take us beyond the next few years.

One way we are participating in this national action to build a future-proof talent pipeline is by partnering with Technical and Vocational Education and Training colleges to deliver our reputed software developer training. In the short term, we will run a small pilot to train 50 alumni in one college. Our long-term goal is to scale up to training thousands of software specialists in colleges across the country to address the local and international shortage of tech skills.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.