With the Eastern Cape the likely home of SA’s first-ever smart city, universities and TVET colleges will have a critical role to play in skilling and training people to ensure they have the right skills to thrive.
This is according to co-operative governance minister Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who said on Monday that higher learning institutions must help SA build job creators instead of job seekers.
“Education and skills is about investing in our most precious resource, the people themselves.
“You can have gold, diamonds and even the Mpondo gold (cannabis), but without people, you cannot turn that into wealth,” Dlamini-Zuma told the inaugural Eastern Seaboard Development (ESD) skills revolution summit at Walter Sisulu University’s Nelson Mandela Drive Campus in Mthatha on Monday.
The minister said the OR Tambo district in particular was the epitome of the paradox of Africa — that of a rich Africa and poor Africans.
The ESD initiative is a broad, multifaceted vision by the government to develop a new smart city and to galvanise development across the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
It is also the state’s flagship project for the district development model, aimed at connecting opportunities across four district municipalities — OR Tambo and Alfred Nzo, Ugu and Harry Gwala — straddling the two provinces.
In his 2019 state of the nation address, President Cyril Ramaphosa asked the nation whether the time had not arrived to build a new smart city, founded on technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
He said he dreamt of a SA where the first entirely new city built in the democratic era rose, complete with skyscrapers, schools, universities, hospitals and factories.
Dlamini-Zuma said for a long time, SA and rest of the continent had been expected to export raw materials for processing cheaply and yet the processed goods cost 10 times more when they arrived back in the country.
She said she hoped the ESD initiative would eventually put a stop to that.
“When you export raw materials, you are exporting jobs and you are also exporting revenue because as soon as they are processed, they are 10 times expensive.
“Our universities and colleges are critical in ensuring that we start to manufacture and process those raw materials ourselves.
“Cannabis must get into the value chain. Agriculture is very important because the land here [OR Tambo district] is fertile.”
She said the new smart city would have to have a vibrant economy able to create huge numbers of jobs.
It must also be safe for children, women and disabled people while also resilient to natural disasters.
She said for the smart city to become a reality, the country would need everything, from engineers, to designers.
“You need people who are going to build roads, people who are going to design the city and engineers.
“If we don’t empower local people, they will remain poor.
“We need to train them because we will need all the skills for this city,” Dlamini-Zuma said.
Earlier, deputy basic education minister Dr Makgabo Reginah Mhaule told the summit that the skills mismatch was a major problem facing SA.
The country also had a dearth of requisite skills, particularly ICT, engineering and technical skills, child and youth care skills, business and management skills as well as welding and plumbing and agricultural and environmental skills.
“This mismatch is posing a significant obstacle to the development of the economy and job creation,” she said.
However, she said the department of basic education was aligning its curriculum towards the needs of the country’s job market.
The summit offered an opportunity for the government and the country to discuss the skills revolution to help SA adapt to the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Department of higher education deputy director-general Zukile Mvalo, giving an overview of the national skills master plan, said at least 32.2% of SA workers were employed in occupations they did not have the correct qualification for while 28.1% of people worked in occupations for a which a higher level qualification was required, meaning they were underqualified for the jobs.
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