Transparency failures risk turning aviation transformation into another costly state scandal.
It’s almost too easy to imagine the comrades, sitting around, deciding how and what to eat from the apparently limitless well of taxpayer rands.
Training and skills development? Yes, we need that. And where do we need it? Aviation.
Because it has been dominated for years by white males. So far, so good.
The ANC-led government was, after all, elected to create a “better life for all” and staked its very existence on policies to “transform” South Africa.
No-one can begrudge, then, the fact that the National Skills Fund (NSF) has been pouring millions into aviation-related skills development, including projects run by entities such as Flyfofa Aviation Solutions, Vukani Aviation and the Deloitte-Ukhubhaba Consortium.
Most of these projects include stipulations that candidates for courses ranging from flight attendant to pilot, should come from applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, and specifically from those who went to poor schools (those graded quintile 1 to 3). Again, so far so good.
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This is, in theory, a transformative programme. Then, why, in the past two annual financial reporting periods, is there an almost total lack of information by which the success or failure of these programmes can be judged?
In NSF reports, there are no approval dates, no fund distribution schedules and no clear indication of whether projects were newly approved, rolled over, delayed, or completed.
Aviation projects are instead absorbed into aggregated discretionary grant reporting, obscuring how much public funding individual entities received and over what period.
Critically, both reports fail to disclose learner-level data, with no confirmation of how many trainees enrolled in aviation programmes, or how many completed the training.
Surely, that last data is absolutely essential when reporting any sort of public expenditure?
The fact that this information is missing makes us wonder whether it does exist at all, or if this is just another eating menu for comrades.
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