By Oupa Nkoane, Administrator: Construction Education and Training Authority (CETA)
Reflections from the National Press Club and UNISA SBL Distinction Dialogue.
There is an understandable temptation to regard the end of administration as evidence that an institution has been fixed.
Oupa Nkoane, Administrator: Construction Education and Training Authority (CETA).
Supplied by CETA
But administration, by its very nature, is temporary. It can intervene, stabilise, correct and redirect. It cannot, on its own, guarantee that an institution will never return to the conditions that necessitated intervention in the first place.
Perhaps the more important question, therefore, is not when administration ends, but what remains when the Administrator leaves.
That question sat at the heart of the National Press Club and UNISA Graduate School of Business Leadership Distinction Dialogue on 13 August 2026. Under the theme “Resetting the PSET Sector: Governance and the Road Beyond Administration”, Minister of Higher Education and Training Hon. Buti Manamela and administrators from across the post-school education and training sector were asked to look beyond the intervention itself: what has been corrected, what has been learned, and what must endure if institutions are not to relapse into the same governance failures.
For CETA, this is not an abstract question. The institution has experienced administration before. The responsibility of the current intervention is therefore not merely to stabilise CETA for a season, but to confront the weaknesses that contributed to instability, establish disciplines capable of outliving administration, and reposition the organisation to deliver differently.
Stabilisation begins with the fundamentals
During the dialogue, I reflected on some of the areas that demanded decisive attention: procurement governance, discretionary grant commitments, audit remediation, institutional stability and the relationship between CETA and the construction and built-environment sector it exists to serve.
One of the early interventions under administration was to halt a significant discretionary grant process where the level of proposed commitments raised concerns about affordability and CETA’s ability to sustainably honour those commitments. The process had to be reassessed and realigned with the institution’s available fiscal resources.
That decision speaks to a wider governance principle. Public institutions must be ambitious about delivery, but ambition cannot be divorced from affordability. Commitments made today become obligations tomorrow. Sometimes responsible leadership requires an institution to stop, reassess and start differently rather than allow the pressure to deliver today to create an institutional problem tomorrow.
The same discipline applies to procurement, financial controls and audit remediation. These may appear removed from the visible business of developing skills, but they are the foundations upon which sustainable delivery rests. Governance is not separate from impact; governance enables impact.
The work is not complete. The latest audit still identifies matters requiring attention, which is precisely why institutional renewal cannot be reduced to a declaration that the organisation has been “fixed”. The real work is to ensure that stronger controls, accountability and responsible decision-making become institutional behaviours rather than temporary features of administration.
A national challenge: Move the needle
The Distinction Dialogue also lifted the conversation beyond the circumstances of individual institutions. Minister Manamela described a PSET environment in which immediate pressures can easily consume leadership attention. In what he called a “noisy sector”, the challenge is to remain focused on what is strategic and on the interventions capable of moving the needle for society.
His argument was larger than institutional stabilisation. Universities, TVET colleges, SETAs and other parts of the PSET system must operate with greater co-ordination and a clearer line of sight to the country’s Skills Revolution. Governance interventions matter because they restore the institutional capacity required to deliver that mandate.
The Minister then put the challenge in practical terms: every rand invested in training must increasingly move people towards employment. He called for stronger work-integrated learning and for employers to open workplaces to learners and apprentices.
From counting activity to tracing opportunity
That national challenge intersects directly with the direction we are setting for CETA.
For years, skills development institutions have necessarily accounted through numbers: learners enrolled, beneficiaries funded, programmes completed and qualifications achieved. These remain important measures. But in an economy confronted by unemployment and persistent skills mismatches, they cannot be where the conversation ends.
The harder question is: what happened to the learner afterwards
Did training lead to meaningful workplace exposure? Did it build occupational competence? Did it improve the learner’s prospects of entering the labour market? Did the investment create a pathway into productive economic participation?
At the dialogue, I made the point that our outlook must increasingly shift from simply asking how many people we have trained to asking how many have progressed through work-integrated learning towards real economic opportunity and employment.
Connecting skills to the economy
For CETA, the construction sector gives this thinking a practical expression. South Africa’s infrastructure programme should leave behind more than physical assets. Major projects can also become platforms through which artisans, apprentices, graduates and candidate professionals gain the workplace experience that turns learning into competence.
A construction site can also be a place of learning. An infrastructure project can become a pathway into work.
But this will not happen by accident. Skills development must be deliberately connected to economic activity.
This is why CETA is moving away from an overly fragmented, piecemeal approach towards strategic, large-scale programme interventions that can connect skills investment more deliberately with industry demand, infrastructure activity, work-integrated learning and employment pathways.
The objective is not scale for its own sake. It is integration: connecting employers to training, training to workplaces, workplaces to experience, and experience to economic opportunity.
That also changes the relationship required with industry. CETA can fund learning interventions, but it cannot manufacture workplace experience from an office. Employers hold the construction sites, projects, workshops and professional environments in which occupational competence is developed. The Skills Revolution therefore requires more than a funding relationship with industry; it requires a delivery partnership.
At the same time, CETA must look ahead. Innovative construction methods, new technologies, sustainability imperatives and evolving industry practices will reshape the capabilities the sector requires. A renewed institution cannot simply become better at administering yesterday’s skills programmes. It must become better at anticipating tomorrow’s skills needs.
What must remain when administration ends
This is where the governance conversation and the skills conversation ultimately meet.
An institution cannot pursue ambitious, employment-centred skills development without sound governance. Equally, good governance means little if an institution becomes administratively compliant but fails to improve the outcomes experienced by the people and industries it exists to serve.
CETA therefore has to do both: continue strengthening institutional discipline while building a more responsive model of skills development.
There has been progress, but institutional renewal requires honesty about the work that remains. Stakeholders will ultimately judge CETA not by the language of renewal, nor simply by the conclusion of administration, but by what the institution does differently because of what it has learned.
Administration can correct systems. It can restore discipline. It can reset relationships and redirect strategy. But an Administrator cannot become the institution.
The systems must endure. The disciplines must endure. The partnerships must endure. And the commitment to translating skills investment into meaningful economic opportunity must endure.
The real test will not simply be whether administration ends. It will be whether CETA has changed enough not to need it again.
