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The debate around South Africa’s Skills Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) has resurfaced with familiar intensity.
There are persistent calls to abolish the SETAs and redirect levy resources entirely back to the private sector.
It is a tidy, populist message.
However, in a nation still undoing structural inequality, simplicity is not a substitute for seriousness.
To dismantle the SETA system is not just an administrative error; it is a retreat from the responsibility of building a developmental state.
The SETA system was never intended to be a mere administrative convenience.
It is a pillar of our democratic project, designed to reverse a labour market architecture engineered to exclude the majority of our people.
The legislation governing these authorities was enacted to give practical expression to the constitutional right to education, training, and economic participation.
To suggest that we should abandon this architecture is to argue that the work of redressing historical inequality is finished. It is not.
Beyond the administrative noise, the system continues to move billions of rands into learnerships, apprenticeships, and bursaries.
It provides a vital lifeline for thousands of young people who would otherwise be locked out of the economy.
From TVET colleges to artisan development, the SETA landscape remains a critical engine for the skills revolution—a necessary transition to reposition our post-school education system toward developmental outcomes.
We do not hold the system beyond criticism.
Governance failures — maladministration, board instability, and procurement irregularities — are serious.
They undermine public trust and must be rooted out.
However, we must not confuse governance failure with institutional irrelevance.
A capable, ethical, and developmental state requires reform, not demolition.
When a public institution faces challenges, the duty of the state is to intervene, stabilise, and strengthen, not to surrender the national mandate to private interests.
Crucially, the “governance” argument is often a distraction. SETA boards are tripartite; they include representatives from organised labour and organised business.
If there have been failures, they have occurred under the watch of these very stakeholders.
If the private sector cannot ensure integrity while sitting on these boards, there is no evidence that transferring sole control of these levies to them would result in anything other than a further erosion of the public interest.
The call to abolish SETAs ignores the elephant in the room: the workplace absorption crisis.
We are often told that SETAs fail because trainees do not secure jobs.
This is a profound misunderstanding.
Thousands of young people complete institutional training only to be blocked from qualification because industry refuses to provide the necessary workplace exposure and trade-testing hours.
Skills development cannot function in a vacuum.
It is a shared responsibility between the state and economic actors.
Shifting resources will not create a single job if the private sector remains unwilling to absorb and mentor new entrants. We need an inclusive growth path where employers are active partners in the skills revolution, rather than mere claimants of state resources.
Recent policy shifts, such as increasing the mandatory grant allocation, signal a decisive attempt to strengthen direct workplace-based training while tightening oversight on discretionary spending.
This is the mark of a system refining its tools, not abandoning its goals.
South Africa does not need the abandonment of its skills development architecture. We need:
- Stricter Accountability: Mandatory, measurable competency standards for board appointments, replacing patronage with performance.
- Consequence Management: Zero tolerance for maladministration and strengthened audit enforcement.
- Performance-Linked Delivery: Aligning every rand of the levy with national priorities of industrialisation, the green transition, and mass youth employment.
- Integrated Planning: A tighter alignment between training authorities and national industrial strategies, ensuring our training output meets the demands of our evolving sectors.
Our unemployment crisis and our industrial ambitions require institutional improvement.
We are committed to a state that is responsive, ethical, and capable of driving transformation.
Policy destruction disguised as reform is a luxury we cannot afford.
We must fix the governance, deepen the investment in our youth, and finish the project of building a truly inclusive economy.
- Dr Masixole Bangeni and Mlibo Qoboshiyane, Eastern Cape MPL. The authors write in their personal capacities
