The state-owned fuel company floated a highly suspect scheme to train 5,500 artisans, funded by taxpayers – R1.2-billion would have been diverted to fix PetroSA’s ailing offshore oil rig. As universities open their doors, one in three young South Africans will be left behind at home – 34% (age 15 to 24) are not in employment, education or training, according to Stats SA. Yet ANC chair Gwede Mantashe has suggested that these unemployed young people have only themselves to blame.
“The ANC has given you a fishing rod – must it now catch fish for you?” Mantashe, who is also minister of minerals and petroleum, said during a recent SABC interview. “I’m now over 70, I’ve never had government looking for a job for me, never. The difference is that today, because we have a progressive government, people expect government to go and give them jobs…” Yet an amaBhungane investigation has uncovered how PetroSA – a state-owned entity in Mantashe’s portfolio – attempted to divert R1.2-billion from a fund earmarked to provide training to unemployed youth.
The National Skills Fund (NSF), which is financed by a 1% tax on every employer’s salary bill, is meant to fund training for unemployed youth, provide bursaries to students and build technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges to train artisans. The R3.5-billion grant that PetroSA requested from NSF in May 2024 would have paid for an opaque scheme to train 5,500 artisans who would supposedly become the future workforce for the oil and gas industry. But documents show that R1.2-billion would have been used to fix PetroSA’s ailing offshore oil rig.
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The scheme was the brainchild of political operator and soccer club owner Lawrence Mulaudzi, whose company, Equator Holdings, had been awarded a contract to secure funding to pay for PetroSA’s offshore infrastructure revamp. The project was ultimately never funded after both PetroSA and the NSF pulled out of the deal. But what it illustrates – and why we’ve taken the time to write about a deal that failed – is how it is possible for the well-connected to extract billions of rands from the NSF, while desperate students and unemployed South Africans are left out in the cold.
Mantashe dodged the question of whether he had been aware of the PetroSA and Equator proposal: “Whether I’m aware or not, it doesn’t matter. I am not an operator, I’m doing political oversight,” he told us.
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