UNEMPLOYABLE, MR MBEKI? FIRST ACCOUNT FOR THE SKILLS INSTITUTIONS LOST ON YOUR WATCH...

I strongly maintain that a former president may diagnose a skills crisis. He may not erase his government's role in weakening the institutions that produced skills - and then hand the bill to the unemployed.

"Before you call the people unemployable, account for the institutions that were merged, closed or stripped of purpose on your watch."

Former president Thabo Mbeki recently asked why millions of South Africans are unemployed and answered: "The reason they are unemployable is because they don't have the skills that the modern economy and society need." That sentence may sound like a diagnosis. Coming from a man who occupied the Presidency from 1999 to 2008, it also sounds like a confession written in the passive voice.

Who failed to build those skills? Who redesigned the institutions that once trained teachers, artisans, technicians and public servants? Who presided over the decisive years in which colleges were merged, absorbed, stripped of their identities or diverted to other uses? A former head of state cannot speak as though the skills system descended from the clouds. Government built it, restructured it, funded it - or starved it.

THE INSULT INSIDE THE DIAGNOSIS

Let us concede what is true: South Africa has a serious skills mismatch. Too many people leave school without the literacy, numeracy, technical competence or workplace experience demanded by a modern economy. But to leap from that truth to the sweeping label "unemployable" is intellectually lazy and politically indecent. It converts a structural failure into a defect of the citizen. It turns policy casualties into suspects.

The latest numbers make glib language especially offensive. Statistics South Africa reported an official unemployment rate of 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026: 8.5 million people officially unemployed. Youth unemployment reached 47.4%. Even graduates faced 12.4% unemployment. A skills shortage is part of the story; it is not the whole story. An economy that cannot absorb many qualified people has a job-creation crisis as well as a training crisis.

Mr Mbeki, you do not get to reduce this national emergency to what workers supposedly lack. The state also lacks: coherent industrial policy, functioning municipalities, reliable infrastructure, scalable apprenticeships, accessible transport, patient finance for small firms and an economy expanding quickly enough to employ the people it trains. "Unemployable" is not a complete explanation. It is an indictment that conveniently omits the state from the dock.

A PRESIDENCY IS NOT A SPECTATOR SEAT

The restructuring of teacher education began before Mbeki became president, and honesty requires that fact to be stated. But honesty also requires the next fact: the decisive consolidation continued during his presidency. A Department of Education technical report records that South Africa had roughly 101 public colleges of education in 1994; ten years later none remained as an independent entity. Many were closed, merged or incorporated as part of provincial rationalisation.

In December 2000, under President Mbeki and Education Minister Kader Asmal, 25 colleges were declared subdivisions of universities and technikons with effect from January 2001. The official rationale included quality, cost, duplication and an alleged oversupply of primary teachers. Those concerns were not invented. Yet the same official review later acknowledged the consequences: a major reduction in institutions offering teacher education, a sharp fall in enrolments and funding that did not adequately follow the transferred function.

That is the point the former president must confront. Policy can be well-intentioned and still leave damage. Rationalisation can remove duplication and also destroy access. A merger can improve the institution that survives while hollowing out the town that loses a campus. If the outcome is fewer local routes into teaching and technical work, the authors of that architecture cannot later shame citizens for lacking skills.

BOPHUTHATSWANA: PUT THE INSTITUTIONAL LEDGER ON THE TABLE

The former homeland of Bophuthatswana left an extensive - and deeply contested - institutional footprint across today's North West and parts of Gauteng. Apartheid's homeland system was illegitimate, exclusionary and authoritarian. Saying so does not require democratic South Africa to waste every school, workshop, studio or training asset it inherited. Liberation should have transformed useful capacity, not treated it as disposable merely because of its origin.

The record shows how the old teacher-training network lost its independent form. Mankwe College of Education was among the institutions designated for incorporation. Mankwe Christian College of Education, Lehurutshe College of Education and Taung College of Education later became FET college sites. That means it would be inaccurate to claim that every building was simply abandoned. But buildings are not the same as institutional capacity. The relevant questions are whether teacher-training places survived, whether workshops remained functional, whether hostels and laboratories were maintained, and whether rural students retained affordable access.

The vocational ledger is just as important. Setlogelo Technikon became Technikon North-West and was then merged with Pretoria Technikon and Technikon Northern Gauteng to form Tshwane University of Technology in 2004. Government's own restructuring document contemplated moving Technikon North-West's students and staff into the merged institution while exploring other uses for its infrastructure. That may have looked efficient on a national spreadsheet. What did it do to local access, identity and the regional pipeline of practical skills? That question deserves evidence, not nostalgia - and certainly not insults.

Communities also point to former Bophuthatswana police and military colleges, training grounds, workshops and vocational facilities whose original functions disappeared or whose assets deteriorated after integration. The original absorption of the Bophuthatswana Police and Defence Force into the national services occurred in 1994, before Mbeki's presidency; it would be false to lay that initial decision at his feet. But the stewardship of those assets during 1999-2008 is a legitimate question. Which facilities were retained, repurposed, mothballed, transferred, sold or allowed to decay? A statesman who now lectures the unemployed should volunteer the inventory.

BOP BROADCASTING: YOUR GOVERNMENT MUST OWN ITS DECISION

The same standard applies to Bop Broadcasting. The public record does not substantiate the claim that Mbeki personally issued an order to close it. What the record does show is politically sufficient: in 2003, the SABC confirmed a closure decision announced in Parliament by Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri. She said the Bop Broadcasting operation would be closed and replaced by a service delivering indigenous languages to the northern region. This happened under the Mbeki administration.

Collective cabinet accountability is not erased because a minister made the announcement or a public broadcaster implemented the decision. Bop TV and its associated facilities represented jobs, production experience, technical broadcasting skills and a regional creative platform. If government believed closure and replacement were justified, it must show what capacity replaced them, how many jobs and training opportunities were preserved, and what became of the infrastructure. The burden is on the government that acted, not on the workers who lived with the consequences.

SKILLS MATTER. SO DO JOBS.

There is a deeper economic error in the "unemployable" label. Labour markets have two sides. Workers supply skills; firms and the state create demand for labour. Training ten thousand artisans does not guarantee ten thousand jobs if construction stalls, municipalities collapse, infrastructure budgets go unspent and small contractors cannot obtain credit. Producing graduates does not solve unemployment if investment is weak and entry-level posts demand experience no newcomer can acquire.

Mbeki is entitled to argue that South Africa must improve education and practical training. He is not entitled to present the unemployed as a defective mass while treating the policy state as an innocent observer. Apartheid deliberately underdeveloped black South Africans. Democratic governments inherited that catastrophe. But inheritance is not immunity. Thirty-two years into democracy, post-apartheid choices must be judged on their own record.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY NOW REQUIRES

If the former president wants his intervention taken seriously, he should do more than defend a phrase. He should call for an institution-by-institution ledger covering the former Bophuthatswana footprint and the wider country: what was closed, merged, incorporated, sold, repurposed or left idle; what training capacity existed before; what survives now; and which communities lost access. Let the audit include teacher colleges, technikons, FET and vocational centres, police and military training assets, broadcasting facilities, workshops, residences and equipment.

Then follow the evidence with repair. Rebuild teacher-education capacity where shortages and geography justify it. Recapitalise TVET workshops instead of repainting entrances while machinery fails inside. Guarantee paid apprenticeships linked to public infrastructure projects. Reward firms that train and retain first-time workers. Convert dormant state facilities into accredited artisan, digital, media and public-service academies. Restore community and rural training routes that do not require a poor student to relocate hundreds of kilometres.

And retract the contempt contained in the blanket label. Say instead that South Africans have been denied the skills, work experience and economic opportunities they deserve - and that every administration, including your own, must account for its share. That would be statesmanship. Doubling down would be evasion.

THE VERDICT

South Africans are not unemployable. They are undertrained in places, overqualified in others, stranded far from jobs, excluded from networks, priced out of study, failed by schools, blocked from apprenticeships and trapped in an economy that does not create enough work. Those are conditions produced by history, policy and power. They are not defects in the national character.

Mr President, own the record. Own the mergers carried out on your watch. Own the institutions whose original missions disappeared. Own the closure decisions taken by your administration. Own the failure to ensure that capacity, funding and access survived every restructuring. You may warn the country about a skills crisis. But you may not insult the casualties of governance and then present yourself as a detached commentator. Before you call the people unemployable, answer the question your own words provoke: what did your government do to make them employable - and what did it dismantle along the way?