Higher Education and Training Minister Buti Manamela has used a rare extended sit-down with The National this week to lay out his boldest case yet for overhauling South Africa's 21 Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs), arguing that the system underpinning the country's artisan and skills pipeline needs more than a headcount reduction, it needs new architecture.
Just a little more than a year into the job, Manamela described SETA reform as one of three central preoccupations of his term, alongside stabilising governance across his sprawling portfolio and fixing the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS).
But it is the SETAs — the bodies with a R28 billion budget and that collect employer skills levies and are meant to fund artisan training, apprenticeships and workplace learning — that he emphasised as the lever most tied to the jobs crisis.
SETAs have already caused a headache for the department. Former Minister Nobuhle Nkabane was dismissed and found guilty of gross misconduct by Parliament's Ethics Committee for misleading MPs about a “phantom” independent panel that she claimed had vetted SETA board chair appointments, who were widely criticised as politically connected placements.
Within 19 days of taking office, Manamela placed three SETAs under administration, apart from separate governance interventions at NSFAS, whose board he said was not properly constituted and required a court-supervised review process after several members, including the chair, resigned.
Manamela has previously stressed that SETAs should no longer be viewed as grant-disbursing agencies or bursary administrators but as strategic economic institutions responsible for aligning workplace learning with industry demand.
"So that's why we reposition the SETAs," Manamela said, describing a shift away from generalist sector boards toward bodies organised around specific trades.
The stakes: A youth jobs crisis
The urgency is underscored by the latest labour force numbers. Statistics South Africa's second quarter figures put youth unemployment (ages 15–34) at 47.4%, with five million young people out of work — an increase of 264,000 from the previous quarter, even as the number of employed youth fell. Among narrower, younger cohorts the rate climbs above 60%.
It is against that backdrop that SETAs matter. They are the primary conduit for turning employer levies into learnerships, internships and workplace-based training that connect TVET colleges and school-leavers to actual jobs.
Manamela conceded that a handful of poorly performing SETAs have distorted public perception of the whole system, insisting that over 15 to 20 years, SETA-funded programmes have driven the expansion of digital and technical training centres and trained hundreds of thousands of artisans nationally, even as current output falls short of National Development Plan targets.
He also confirmed a long-flagged reform: raising the mandatory employer grant migration from 20% to 40%, intended to force greater business participation in funding and hosting workplace training.
“We cannot let business go through by consistently letting them run away,” he said, arguing that companies benefit from a skilled labour pool without carrying enough of the training burden themselves.
From debate to Cabinet decision
Manamela's remarks echo — and are reinforced by — a written reply his department tabled in April, responding to a parliamentary question about President Cyril Ramaphosa's State of the Nation Address (SONA) commitment to rationalise the SETAs.
That reply stated plainly that the SONA announcement “eflects a firm government commitment to SETA rationalisation, not a reopening of the debate about whether it should happen” after more than five years of the issue being “debated, argued, parked and/or shelved”.
The department's written response set out that rationalisation options now before Cabinet go beyond simply merging same-sector SETAs to cut numbers, an approach it said had already been tried in earlier debates and found insufficient to fix poor governance, misaligned levy disbursement and weak employer accountability.
Instead, officials are modelling a configuration review of the 21-SETA structure (unchanged since 2000), possible mergers where sectors overlap or individual SETAs are too small to be viable, and governance and accountability reforms that would apply regardless of the final number of SETAs.
In the interview, Manamela said his department has already begun consolidating “back-office” functions - IT systems, corporate services and bargaining structures - ahead of a bigger structural shift expected around 2030, when current SETA licences expire.
“And that will go on with some of the corporate services staff, some of the business operations staff, and so on and so forth. And then once the licenses of the SETAs come up in 2030, a new model will have to be made. But what's definite is the change is coming in terms of how SETAs will be,” he said, adding that his department is not waiting for the licence deadline to start building the new model.
In the long run, Manalema said, SETAs need a “less governance-heavy” skills architecture focused on occupational trades or professional skills rather than the current sprawl of institutions.
“What you need to reduce is the governance-heavy stuff. But get them to focus on specific industries, like the old industry boards. Some people are saying you must reduce them based on economic drivers and economic priorities,” he said.
“People are saying we need to reduce them based on occupational trades, meaning that you will have a SETA for electricians, a SETA for mechanics, a SETA for boiler makers, and so on and so forth. So those are some of the things that are being looked at as to what will ultimately be the final architecture of SETAs.”
Governance as the recurring theme
Governance featured as the thread running through nearly every institution under Manamela's authority.
With 26 universities, 21 SETAs, 50 TVET colleges and the Council on Higher Education under one portfolio — more than 150 institutions in total, each with its own board and reporting lines — Manamela argued his department carries a governance burden with few equivalents in government.
“The problem that is happening with SETAs is rationalisation,” he said of the sector's core weakness, while cautioning that reducing the number of entities is not, by itself, a fix.
Asked to assess his own record after 13 months, he said there is “generally a sense of stability within the sector as it relates to governance issues”, even as court challenges to some of his interventions continue to test that claim.