{"id":174295,"date":"2017-05-10T14:22:21","date_gmt":"2017-05-10T12:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=174295"},"modified":"2017-05-10T15:47:00","modified_gmt":"2017-05-10T13:47:00","slug":"south-africa-lacks-the-knowledge-and-skills-to-use-its-own-natural-resources-analyst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/business\/174295\/south-africa-lacks-the-knowledge-and-skills-to-use-its-own-natural-resources-analyst\/","title":{"rendered":"South Africa lacks the knowledge and skills to use its own natural resources: analyst"},"content":{"rendered":"

South Africa has the natural resources but not the knowledge and skills to create value out of those natural resources, according to Wits Business School lecturer Sandile Swana speaking in an interview with Morning Live<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

“The issue is in reverse order as far as I can see,” said Swana.<\/p>\n

“The greatest resource that any nation has is its human resource. Not the minerals under the ground or any other natural thing. So if you want development to happen invest in the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

“In other words, \u00a0you can walk for centuries above the ground and not be able to mine the minerals under ground. And that’s only a function of your knowledge, your understanding of technology etc, etc. It’s got nothing to do with the minerals themselves, it’s got something to do with you the human being. ”<\/p>\n

Swana noted it was still puzzling how South Africa had failed to develop proper value chains for all of its natural resources and processing them on South African soil instead of sending them to Japan, Israel or anywhere else.<\/p>\n

“From 1994 we could have had Technikons and Engineering schools to make products out these things but that has not occurred to our government until now.”<\/p>\n

When asked if this lack of development was solely government’s responsibility,\u00a0Swana said that while it was not all government’s burden to help develop these skills, he highlighted that in South Africa the practice of developing human resources was the realm of government because virtually all of the schools, technikons and government’s were nationalised.<\/p>\n

“To discuss things that go on at private schools is a waste of time because our people are at public schools, are at public universities,” he said.<\/p>\n

“The second issue is that in the mid-1970’s we had large quantities of technicians and artisans in South Africa which were developed by the state in conjunction with industry, municipalities, SOE’s and general businesses.”<\/p>\n

“Since the period of independence in 1994 that number has drastically fallen. Right now our people our are not in a position, in most of these industries to ask what is it that I can contribute so that I can be paid.”<\/p>\n

In tackling this issue, Swana highlighted that it was not necessary for government to tackle every industry, but rather they should choose sectors, even if its just 4 or 5, to develop hardcore knowledge and skills in these\u00a0industries.<\/p>\n

Quoting the recently released Employment Equity report also noted that space needed to be created in the predominantly white-held sectors and that entirely new black-owned businesses should be created to address the above issues.<\/p>\n

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Read:\u00a0Government looking to punish companies not following BEE laws in South Africa<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South Africa has the natural resources but the indigenous masses don’t have the knowledge and skills to create value out of those natural resources, according to Wits Business School lecturer Sandile Swana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":74324,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9872],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-174295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-active"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174295"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174329,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174295\/revisions\/174329"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}