There is a war for talent raging in SA, particularly in the fields of engineering and science, that demands our immediate attention.
In an energy group, a colleague requested recommendations for a graduate electrical or mechanical engineer with a BSc, BEng or BTech. The responses were insightful:
“Please let me know where to find those resources with those qualifications ... We have a serious technical resource shortage in SA ... We battled to find a black female student studying engineering to offer a bursary to ...
“When I recruited two years ago, not one applicant was female ... I was employed during the second semester of my second year in university. Most female engineers are employed in their second or third year in university.”
Ask any project developer how long it takes to get a quote and you will hear it takes up to a year to get a quote from an engineering consulting firm; for work, they can only start from 2026 onwards. Order books are full, and it is difficult to get people.
A Nedbank infrastructure report estimated infrastructure projects to the value of R793.7bn were approved in the first half of 2024, up from R193.2bn in 2023. The government is the major project driver, with more than half of projects in the public sector. These are projects that will start construction in 2025.
We have been calling for a rollout of infrastructure projects and they are finally here, but the industry is ill-equipped. The energy sector is looking for resources for bid window 7, commercial and industrial projects, gas to power, nuclear and transmission projects. All of these rollouts need a competent set of experienced engineers, lawyers, accountants, economists and environmental, social and governance professionals.
These are the same resources that are in demand all over the world. We are in fierce competition with South America, Australia, Asia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, all of which are on recruitment drives for their infrastructure projects. Black SA women are taking positions on construction sites in Peru and working as mining engineers in Australia, highlighting the global scale of this issue.
I’ve previously lamented SA’s lackadaisical approach to skills development. Without clear market signals, you cannot plan resources adequately. Everything starts with an economic ambition that should drive our industrialisation goals. For instance, when energy projects were being rolled out from 2011 as per the Integrated Resource Plan 2010, that was a clear market signal for bankers, engineers, procurement and risk specialists of what was to come.
Universities primed themselves and started offering energy qualifications to bridge this gap. There was a big push towards schoolchildren doing science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects at the time. So, the plan was there. However, with the lag between project announcement and implementation many valuable skills wandered to foreign fields.
These skills are not gone forever though, and are always eager to come back. However, there is a need for clear government signalling. There is a fallacy that the private sector creates jobs. Like all other global economies, SA has shown that the government drives investment and capital formation, underwrites risk and creates opportunities for localisation, industrialisation and job creation for the private sector.
The private sector, along with the government, then needs to implement the setting up of procurement and preparation of the supply chain with military execution, and engage law enforcement to address the construction mafia issue, which has brought far too many projects to a halt.
We need to ramp up capacity — financial and human. This includes sending a market signal to the departments of basic and higher education that in nine years we will need a cohort of nuclear physicists and oil, gas and renewable energy engineers.
It is disingenuous to criticise the skills shortage in SA when government policies and uncertainty have contributed to it. Years of austerity measures, corruption, crime and ineptitude have driven away talented individuals and resources, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Mashele, an energy economist, is a member of the board of the National Transmission Company of SA.
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