Deputy President Deputy President Paul Mashatile is not prepared to admit the truth about the shortage of white, male engineers in the country or the dire consequences thereof, which are mainly due to transformation in the technical industry.
The FF Plus today pointed out to Deputy President Mashatile that the last infrastructure report (2022) of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) emphasised the critical shortage of engineering skills.
The report states that this shortage is one of the main causes of the “decay” of infrastructure and that there is a “critical shortage” of engineering skills in the public sector.
There has also been an exodus of predominantly white, male engineers from the country over the last twenty years – from the private sector as well.
In the public sector, the expertise was mainly replaced by black, female technologists and technicians while the numbers of engineers kept waning.
According to the report, the loss of expertise is also a severe setback for the new generation who enter the technical field seeing as it has left a vacuum in mentorship.
The problem did not appear overnight either. The Institute “pleaded” in an open letter with the government of President Jacob Zuma to appoint more professional engineers in government departments ten years ago already. (Netwerk24, 4 August 2013: “Ingenieurs pleit by regering”).
Deputy President Mashatile is in total denial that white engineers are disappearing to the detriment of the country and all its people.
His answer that a white engineer was head of his department while he served as MEC for Transport in Gauteng and that “no white engineer” will be turned away by the public sector demonstrates this. He also reiterated that transformation should be “streamlined”.
The reality is that transformation does not work. It is baffling that government is not prepared to admit that the country’s infrastructure is collapsing due to a lack of expertise.
All persons, regardless of race or gender, should be given the opportunity to compete on a level playing field in this profession. South Africa can no longer afford to have a government that allows the country to decay for the sake of its trite ideologies.
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