Mabila Mathebula
Imagine yourself being at a hospital ward watching with gnawing anxiety your beloved one’s life ebbing away. You try to intercede on her behalf for God to extend her borrowed time but all your efforts culminate into failure.
The physician approaches family members and tells them that his team tried to apply both theory and practice to save her life but fate failed them. He gives you the latitude to ask any question pertaining to her death after you shockingly reached a stalemate.
The deceased was your relative and to the physician, she was just a patient. The strength of the blood automatically kicks in the grieving process on your part and the physician departs to conduct his ward rounds.
You become emotional about her death because of the attachment and to a physician, losing a patient is part of his job because he is not emotionally attached to any patient. That is why we must draw a line of separation between attachment and detachment.
Unemployment is twofold, there are those who are severely affected by unemployment as well as those who want to gain financial rewards from unemployment. This brings me to the sticky problem of unemployment in South Africa, particularly youth unemployment and the training intervention such as the community works programme (CWP) that ostensibly upskills the unemployed.
Some training providers are disconnected from the social issues of unemployment and their training material is abysmally inadequate to capacitate the unemployed youth and some of whom have lost some credibility in the eyes of the learners.
I had the privilege or “moment of truth”, to conduct a training gap analysis on CWP. A gap analysis can upset and dishearten even the most hard-boiled stakeholders.
Gap analysis is an active process of examining how large a leap must be taken from the current state to a desired state – an estimate of how big the “gap” is. The “analysis” provides the answer to the question of whether the skills and resources at hand are sufficient to close the gap – to achieve the desired future within the proposed period.
Most of these training providers or “trainingpreneurs” are alienated from the training needs of the unemployed youth, they impart little or no knowledge to them. They subject learners to constant training which neither gives them the confidence to join the corporate world nor to start their own businesses.
Perhaps they need to hear Lyndon Johnson’s speech which he delivered at Howard University in 1965: “Freedom is the right to share fully and equally in American society, to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school… But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying now you’re free to go where you want and do as you desire and choose the leaders you please.
“You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, you’re free to compete with others. Negroes are trapped, as many whites are trapped, in inherent gateless poverty. They lack training and skills.”
Most of the service providers cannot make these candidates competent because they are focusing on money and not a product or service that would make these people proper employees or proper entrepreneurs.
We are trapped in what I call “Training Myopia”. This means a nearsighted view of training in terms of the training provided rather than a broader view of needs to be served. Training should create employability and not the other way around. These training providers cannot answer the following questions about their organisations:
* What function (s) does their organisation perform?
* For whom does the organisation perform the function?
* How does the organisation go about filling the functions?
* Why does the organisation exist?
We need to design a training programme that will boost the confidence of young people. Napoleon Hill popularised the phrase “Whatever the mind of man can conceive, it can achieve.” Carnegie told him that no amount of poverty can keep one from success. It is notable that we are dealing with construction mafias in the construction industry.
Equally, there are training mafias in the training space. The common thread that binds them together is gross unprofessionalism, lack of understanding the business environment as well as a lack of managerial skills.
The government programmes have been hijacked by these training mafias. How could a trainer capacitate young people to own and run cooperatives if he lacks business acumen? It is time President Cyril Ramaphosa commissioned an audit for all training service providers in government.
Author and life coach Mathebula has a PhD in Construction Management.