RONNIE SIPHIKA: SA’s construction training model — built to fail, funded to repeat

It’s hard to believe, but the more SA invests in construction training, the less we seem to get out of it. Administered by the Construction Education & Training Authority (Ceta), what should be a pipeline for artisan excellence has instead become a clogged artery of inefficiency, disconnection and systemic waste.

If you’re wondering why we don’t have enough skilled people to build bridges, fix potholes or complete public housing projects on time, you need look no further than this “skills development” machinery, which looks impressive on policy slides but delivers little in concrete terms — pun intended.

At the heart of the dysfunction is a stunning inability to match training content with industry demand. While the world moves towards advanced modular construction, green buildings and drone-enabled site surveying, SA is still teaching students how to swing a shovel and mix mortar like it’s 1983. Our training curricula are fossilised — outdated, misaligned and often completely irrelevant to the realities on site. Graduates leave classrooms with certificates but no practical skills, no digital literacy, and no clue how a real project operates under pressure.

That would be forgivable if students were at least entering the workplace during their studies. But here’s where the model doubles down on failure: workplace-based learning is more suggestion than requirement. Many “qualified” students have never set foot on a functioning construction site. Partnerships with contractors are inconsistent, if not entirely absent, and host companies are either unwilling to engage or unsure what Ceta even expects from them. It’s a bit like handing someone a pilot’s licence because they read the manual — no flying hours needed.

Even when training providers do secure partnerships the quality of those providers varies wildly. The Ceta accreditation process has become a stamp factory, approving centres that have no facilities, unqualified instructors, and in some cases not even running water. In one now-infamous case a provider in the Eastern Cape was training “plumbers” in a converted shipping container with no access to running taps or drainage. This wasn’t an exception — it was one of many examples that highlight just how little oversight exists.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the real engine behind the system: Ceta’s funding model. Students are recruited, enrolled and paraded at launch events. Providers are promised grants. And then... silence. Delays in payments, confusion about disbursement procedures and outright mismanagement have led to training collapses midstream. Some SMMEs, after months of fronting training costs, are now bankrupt — not because they failed to deliver, but because the funding they were promised disappeared somewhere inside an excel spreadsheet at head office.

Then there’s the matter of outcomes. You’d think after 20 years of talking about artisan development we’d have a national database showing who got trained, where they were placed and whether they’re still employed. But such data, if it exists at all, is fragmented and unreliable. No meaningful impact tracking exists. No follow-through. No feedback loop from employers. We have students who finished all modules in 2021 still waiting for their certificates in 2025 — stuck in limbo because the internal systems are just not built to serve students, only to record them.

The crisis is even more visible in rural areas. Where training is needed most — in towns such as Matatiele, Butterworth or Giyani — programmes are scarce, providers are urban-centric, and infrastructure is nonexistent. Young people in these areas are either forced to migrate to access skills training or miss out entirely. Ironically, it’s these same rural municipalities that are desperate for roads, schools and water infrastructure. But the system has not evolved to meet local needs, preferring a centralised, bureaucratic model that can barely deliver in Gauteng — let alone the Eastern Cape.

Then there’s the unspoken but widely felt issue: corruption. From ghost learners to fake attendance registers, the misuse of training funds is not a rumour, it’s a recurring feature. Audits have flagged irregularities, whistle-blowers have spoken out, but little changes. The same implementers continue to get contracts. The same provinces show no improvement. And each year, a new strategic plan is launched, with bold colours and no memory of the mess that came before.

And what does the average student get from all this? If they’re lucky: a certificate, no job and a renewed application for a R350 grant. They are told they’ve been “empowered,” but what they’ve really been given is a front-row seat to a system that talks about transformation while replicating exclusion. We are mass-producing unemployed artisans. It’s not a skills shortage, it’s a failure of delivery.

The Construction Management Foundation has been calling for reform — not just better policy, but better execution, better alignment with industry and better accountability. SA’s infrastructure ambitions demand a skilled workforce, not a trained one. The two are not the same. Until we stop mistaking activity for achievement, and funding disbursement for development, we will keep producing paper-qualified people for a brick-and-mortar industry that desperately needs hands-on competence.

SA is not short of young talent. It is short of a training system that knows what to do with it.

• Siphika is CEO of the Construction Management Foundation.