EDUCATION MINISTER BUTI MANAMELA ACTS AGAINST THREE EMBATTLED SETAS
- BEE NEWS
- Aug 21
- 4 min read
Sisanda Mbolekwa and Sabelo Skiti | 19 August 2025
Training authorities for local government, construction and services placed under administration.
Higher education and training minister Buti Manamela has taken action against three embattled sector education and training authorities (Setas), placing them under administration.
They were gazetted on Tuesday after years of corruption and mismanagement, as well as serious rot reflected in the auditor-general's reports uncovering various irregularities.
This intervention follows serious and entrenched governance failures in these entities, including procurement irregularities, lapses in oversight and board instability, which threatened their ability to deliver on their mandate to advance skills development.
“This decision marks the first step in stabilising eta governance.
We cannot allow governance failures to erode the public’s confidence in our skills development system.
“These administrators have a clear mandate to restore integrity, enforce consequence management where necessary and ensure that learners and workers are not prejudiced by institutional weaknesses. Our goal is to reposition Setas so they can contribute effectively to the fight against unemployment, poverty and inequality,” said Manamela.
Meant to address skills shortages and improve the overall quality of education and training in South Africa, the entities have been riddled with corruption and maladministration, with poor accountability leading to millions spent with little to show for it.
The Local Government Seta (LGSeta), the Construction Education and Training Authority (Ceta) and the Services Seta (SSeta) faced the chopping block, with their operations taken over by administrators appointed by the minister.
Zukile Christopher Mvalo was named the LGSeta administrator, with Dithabe Oupa Nkoane as the Ceta head and Lehlogonolo Alfred Masoga taking over at the SSeta. Their tenures as administrators will last a year. They are to oversee the running of their respective Setas, performing functions such as ensuring sufficient funding for the processes and activities.
The minister has also charged them with submitting monthly progress reports to the director-general. Key to their task is facilitating the appointment of new accounting authorities at the three entities.
Last month this publication reported how finance minister Enoch Godongwana warned his former cabinet colleague Nobuhle Nkabane about malfeasance at the LGSeta three months ago, saying that the process to appoint CEO Ineeleng Molete was beset with irregularities and possible criminal conduct.
The information had come to light during an investigation by the National Treasury’s specialised audit services after a tip-off from a whistle-blower. As a consequence, all remuneration earned by Molete since his appointment would amount to irregular expenditure as defined in section 1 of the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA).
According to a parliamentary reply in January 2023, the CEO of the LGSeta earns R2.5m a year. Molete was appointed in January 2021, so his earnings since then could amount to at least R11m.
Godongwana told Nkabane the Treasury had also uncovered irregularities in the dissolution of the LGSeta’s audit & risk committee by the board.
While Godongwana did not give details in his letter as to why Molete’s appointment was irregular or what irregularities had been uncovered in the dissolution of the board, he recommended that Nkabane take disciplinary action against the members of the selection and interview panel that oversaw Molete’s appointment.
In the Ceta, more than R13m has allegedly been siphoned out of the embattled entity through two contracts meant to provide and administer a biometric system designed to combat fraudulent learner enrolments in training programmes.
At least R6m of this was paid by the Ceta to joint venture EZG Vest and Coinvest Africa to administer the system, despite a warning by the auditor-general (AG) and an internal whistle-blower that there were irregularities in the appointment process.
The other R7.1m was paid to Grayson Reed, a company appointed by the Ceta in 2018 to provide the system, which included biometric scanners and a portal to keep track of learners' attendance and automatically link it to payment of stipends.
The biometric system was meant to verify the identities of learners and ensure that only registered individuals participated in Ceta-funded training programmes. It would have been integrated with Ceta’s Indicium management information system, which is used for registering learners and managing training data, Ceta said on its website.
Despite the system never being operational, Ceta, under CEO Malusi Shezi, proceeded to make monthly payments to the joint venture, essentially for operating a non-existent system, between March 2022 and July 2023 as part of a R50m contract awarded to the two companies in 2021.
The payments stopped only after Coinvest became embroiled in a tender controversy at the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), where it was one of four companies awarded a multibillion-rand contract to make direct payment of students’ allowances into their bank accounts.
Each company was meant to make R330m in profit during the five-year contract, but the tender was stopped after irregularities were picked up in the procurement process. Among them were that none of the companies had a banking licence and all were relatively new to fintech and could not demonstrate adequate experience in the field.
Then NSFAS CEO Andile Nongogo was also found to have had a previous relationship with Coinvest, after overseeing the awarding of equally controversial business to one of its directors, Tshegofatso Ntumba, while he was CEO at the SSeta. Nongogo took special leave and was eventually fired from NSFAS.
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