Our government made a serious blunder by closing technical, nursing and teacher training colleges. They thought a nation is built on university degrees. Even if you want to take your child to technical schools, they are not available. Everything is academic these days and every child is encouraged to go to university instead of technical colleges.

During the old apartheid days, South Africa used to have gardening, house craft, woodwork, home economics and sewing on top of the academic subjects.

That actually made it easier to make a career choice based on what you enjoyed, subject-wise. Even in our schools we don't have enough local teachers. We rely mostly on foreign nationals to teach scarce skills like welding and plumbing.

Most plumbers and electricians are foreign nationals. If all the foreign nationals go back home, we will swim in sewerage or be in the dark while our cars will be parked because it is only a few of our people who have the skills to do those jobs.

South Africa is supposed to produce about 15000 artisans a year to meet the demands of our economy, but we are struggling to do that. People must tell the departments of basic and higher education to wake up and smell the coffee.

People are benefiting by bringing Cubans and Germans to train our artisans . We have a crisis at our FET colleges - most are dysfunctional and fail to train our children.

Soweto, with a population of more than two million people, has only one technical secondary school - George Tabor Technical College. The college was built by the apartheid government. Who will build our bridges and dams?

Sidwell Tshingilane

Soweto