Eastern Cape government ordered to revive abandoned youth employment skills programme

21 Oct 2024

The Eastern Cape High Court has ordered the provincial government to provide a report explaining how it intends to restart an abandoned project that trained young people in the construction industry by using them to build schools.

An Eastern Cape High Court judge has called for a report explaining how the provincial government intends to resume a project introduced by former president Thabo Mbeki in 2005, which officials abandoned halfway.

“The completion [of the project] displays commitment on the part of the State to upskill the learners. For as long as the learnership remains incomplete, there will be no certification, and that will undermine what was intended by former President Thabo Mbeki and the Cabinet: to ensure that these learners ‘through the programme are drawn into productive work and that they gain skills while they work and thus take an important step to get out of the pool of the marginalised’,” Judge Thandi Norman said in her ruling.

Eastern Cape has the highest unemployment rate in the country and a youth unemployment rate of around 53%.

“Failure to complete the learnership would also mean that the state expended millions of rands in the programme and thus invested in the social infrastructure that had no certification. That is not empowerment as it was envisaged by the government. To leave it incomplete undermines the learners and the purpose for which the programme was intended,” Norman said in her judgment.

She ordered that the Minister of Public Works & Infrastructure, the MEC for Public Works, the MEC for Education and the Coega Development Corporation resume the final phase of the construction project so that the learners can obtain their certification (NQF Level 2).

Norman added that this had to be done with speed and work to produce a report describing the plan by mid-November 2024.

She also ordered that a judge oversee the government’s progress in finishing the project.

Mbeki’s plans

The applicants were a group of trainee contractors included in the Expanded Public Works Program (EPWP). They were offered training to become “well-equipped contractors” and achieve an NQF Level 2 (semi-skilled) accreditation.

According to papers before court, their training was “abruptly, unilaterally and arbitrarily discontinued”.

Mbeki first announced the project during his 2003 State of the Nation address.

“To address this investment in social infrastructure, the government has decided that we should launch an expanded public works programme. This will ensure that we draw a significant number of the unemployed into productive work and that these workers gain skills while they work, and thus take an important step to get out of the pool of those who are marginalised,” Mbeki said at the time.

The programme was agreed to at the Growth and Development Summit held in June 2003 and the Cabinet adopted it in November 2003. Mbeki launched the programme in May 2004.

On 11 April 2005, the Eastern Cape newspaper the Daily Dispatch published an advertisement calling for expressions of interest in a contractor training programme that would be part of the Expanded Public Works Programme.

Applicants applied and were admitted to the programme. Initially, 51 learners were selected to take part.

The legal team for the Minister of Public Works argued that the school building projects programme had higher contract values than Grade 1 and Grade 2 contractors might lawfully perform and higher values than the department’s recommended guidelines for training projects for learner contractors.

As a result, the project awarded to the learners exceeded the recommended values for learnership programmes. They further contend that phase 1 ranged between R1.2-million and R1.6-million, and phase 2 ranged between R1.4-million and R11.17-million.

The third phase of the project could not be awarded due to budgetary constraints and the unavailability of suitable construction projects in the schools programme.

As a result, the third and final projects needed by the participants to complete their learnerships were not allocated.

The minister’s legal team further argued that many learners had completed further training elsewhere and were now established contractors with CIDB grading above the grades contemplated by the learnership programmes. They added that what remained of the learnership programme was for the learners to be assessed by an accredited training provider and, if they qualified, to be awarded a competency certificate for the NQF Level 2 qualification.

Families destitute

The learners in the abandoned programme contended it consisted of three phases, and the failure to implement phase 3 projects rendered it incomplete.

According to papers before the court, the project’s third phase was “kept in abeyance due to investigations of allegations of fraud relating to the implementation of the programme”.

The learners were urged to prepare for the programme and complete their portfolios of evidence of work or training. They were advised that upon completion of the investigations, the department would communicate with them on progress and a plan of action.

Then, in December 2015, the learners were told that the fraud investigation had been completed and it had been found that the allegations were unsubstantiated. At this meeting, the minister committed his department to implementing phase 3. Nothing happened, and on 23 March 2017, the Department of Public Works withdrew an allocated list of projects that had been submitted to Coega for the Eastern Cape EPWP.

The reason advanced for the withdrawal was that some of the department’s clients, namely the South African Police Service, Department of Defence, Department of Correctional Services, and the Department of Justice were delaying in signing off the budgets for the 2017/2018 financial year.

The Presidency was asked to intervene, but the president referred the learners to the Premier of the Eastern Cape. The Premier sent them to the Portfolio Committee on Public Works, but nobody helped them.

Norman summarised the trainees’ evidence before the court: “Their lives were ruined for 16 years. Some of their colleagues died, leaving their families destitute. Some had their properties sequestrated ... The applicants contend that the 3rd phase would enable them to acquire NQF Level 2 qualification. They stated that a similar incident occurred to the learners in the North West Province whose matter was investigated and settled,” she said.

The provincial department also argued that the value of the work awarded to the learners exceeded the monetary value of the project work that would have had to be attained in phase 3. They also contended that even though phase 3 had not materialised due to a lack of suitable projects and budgetary constraints, the intended values of the third phase had been achieved.

The court found the spreadsheet provided to support the department’s case lacked sufficient detail. DM

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