There is a job that has been sitting empty for over a year at one of South Africa’s most critical public institutions, and the fight over who fills it has now spilled into the courts. The National Skills Fund — the body responsible for funding skills development across the country — has no permanent CEO, and the battle to change that is exposing something far more uncomfortable than a simple hiring delay: it is exposing exactly how power, process, and accountability collide at the top of government.
Here is what happened. A man named Innocent Sirovha went to the Johannesburg High Court claiming that Higher Education Minister Buti Manamela had interfered with his appointment to the NSF’s top job. Sirovha believed the position was his — he had even been asked to provide his biometric information, which, in any reasonable person’s reading, signals you are about to be hired. But the appointment never came through. On Friday, Acting Judge Albert Nxumalo dismissed Sirovha’s application and referred the matter to the Labour Court instead.
Manamela’s explanation is worth sitting with, because it cuts to the heart of how governance is supposed to work — and how often it quietly fails. The Department of Public Service and Administration flagged missing documents in the recruitment paperwork, specifically the scores achieved by candidates during the selection process. Without those scores, Manamela says he had no defensible basis to take a name to cabinet for ratification. He refused to move forward blind.
“It would be ridiculous for me to submit a preferred candidate without the scoring required,” Manamela said, and that sentence carries real weight. In a country where public appointments are routinely captured, rushed, or manipulated, a minister demanding the paperwork before signing off is not obstruction — it is the bare minimum of due diligence.
These are not bureaucratic niceties. They are the difference between a government that governs and one that merely performs governance. Manamela says he needs to know whether the missing documents reflect a competence failure — someone simply dropped the ball — or a policy failure, meaning the system itself has a gap that keeps producing these outcomes.
The minister has now called for the recruitment process to be reopened entirely, with Sirovha and every other original applicant free to reapply. His position is clear: no one has been appointed, because only cabinet can make that call. The biometric request that Sirovha interpreted as confirmation of his hiring was, in Manamela’s framing, a premature administrative step that carried no legal or official weight. “I can meet with you here and tell you that you’re in, but it means nothing if Minister Ntshavheni does not announce it on the Thursday after cabinet,” he said.
That distinction matters enormously, and not just for Sirovha. It matters for every young person in this country who has watched public institutions be run into the ground by leaders appointed through opaque, undocumented processes that nobody can later scrutinise or challenge. The NSF exists to fund the skills that are supposed to give young people economic futures. A year without permanent leadership at that institution is not a procedural footnote — it is a failure with real human consequences, and whoever eventually sits in that chair needs to get there through a process that nobody can credibly question.
The Labour Court will now decide what happens next with Sirovha’s claim. But the larger story here is not about one man’s job. It is about whether the institutions meant to serve the public are built on foundations solid enough to hold. Right now, the answer is uncertain — and that uncertainty should make everyone uncomfortable.
