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The state of internships in the government sector is inexcusable.
I have it on good authority that government internships are deskilling, disempowering and are a major contributor to lack of work readiness among fresh graduates.
I am also confident to argue that some graduates come out of government internships less encouraged than when they came.
They create a terrible cycle of graduating, followed by high hopes of post internship employment and then ultimately unemployment, thus perpetuating the growing number of youths who are university educated but continue to find themselves in the group that is not in employment, education or training.
Statistics South Africa reported that in the year 2018, 57.4% of young people who had the potential and were willing to work were without employment.
There is a grand concern that this number could be understated when considering the fact that, by the time the statistics were released, some were either in short-term employment or internships.
Drawing from the view that youth is a period of transition from childhood to adulthood marked by newly found social and financial independence, it is not surprising that South Africa’s unemployed youth find themselves in a position of despair, desperation, hopelessness and limited self-worth.
It is also disappointing that both the state of the nation address and Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s 2019 budget speech did not stimulate any confidence in the form of a government plan to address the plight of youth, including youth with university qualifications in South Africa.
The problem here is multifaceted and the solutions all seem either unclear or poorly thought out.
Take the Youth Employment Service (YES) programme for example. The YES programme is in its idealistic sense a “business-led collaboration with government and labour”.
Its intention is to stimulate demand side job creation through company investment and by leveraging government’s existing recognitions such as the Employment Tax Incentive and B-BBEE recognition for broad-based transformation.
This is to be achieved through the placement of black unemployed youth into new, 12-month work experiences, training opportunities and through the development of black-owned small, medium and micro-sized enterprises, which are coupled to employment impact.
In essence, the YES programme intends to be an internship equivalent but coming from the business sector.
The business sector in my view stands to benefit more from it than the actual unemployed graduates.
The YES programme also opens grounds for exploitation of youths, in more or less the same way internships do.
What internships do well is to provide a workforce for government and company at a fraction of the cost.
Interns have no backing, no benefits, no significant endowments and very little protection from exploitation and abuse.
The impression created is that young graduates should be grateful for the meagre “work experience” necessary to gain employment.
Tell this to those who have been through internships but have been out of employment for periods exceeding six months.
Another government measure has been to scrap work experience as a requirement for entry-level public service jobs.
While this sounds exciting at first glance, it creates inadvertent snags.
One of the pressing problems created is a plummet in the already poorly functional public service.
To that end, I suggest that there is no point in scrapping work experience requirements for jobs that are not even there in the public sector. We are told daily how bloated the public sector is.
Instead of scrapping work experience here is what I suggest:
• Standardise and give structure to government internships. It is not enough to go make coffee and copies with a university degree and get paid R5 000 for your troubles. That leaves graduates deskilled and dumber than they were when they came;
• In doing this, draw lessons from private company graduate programmes. Structure the internship in a way that it meets the job functional experience requirements necessary to penetrate the job market. Do this by balancing out training with practical and functional experience. This will not only skill graduates but will make their skills and knowledge adaptable to other environments, thus increasing their employment prospects;
• Rather take a smaller number of interns than delivering a poor “work skills learning environment”. Rather take a few, pay them well and assign suitable mentors actually keen on mentoring young people. Research indicates that mentorship and good compensation boost both morale and work ethic;
• Skills development is the impetus for internships. Investing, training, challenging, coaching and tracking the progress of each graduate will help the graduate grow both professionally and personally.
• Inculcate collaborations between the universities and the public service and administration department. The higher education and training department can lead this;
• Also, create and maintain private sector collaborations. Through the higher education and training department having such relationships with the public and private sector we can be almost certain that universities train graduates in accordance with labour market demands;
• Extend the internship period to two years but in doing this, do not compromise the quality. Match this with the minimum requirements for an entry level job. This will indeed give a rationale to having government internships in the first place; and
• Considering the high cost of higher education, it would perhaps be wise to put a moratorium on universities offering qualifications for which there is a high surplus of unemployed graduates. Education has one of the highest national budgets. Should we not perhaps ask ourselves whether it is reasonable to incur National Student Financial Aid Scheme debt for a qualification for which there is no demand and yet an oversupply of graduates?
Gcina Mtengwane studies social development and social policy at the Wits School of Human and Community Development. He holds a master of social science in rural development and a bachelor of social work from the University of Fort Hare. He writes in his own capacity.
