Dear Minister Meth

I trust you are well.

As the Minister of a department whose sole mission is to combat unemployment, kindly elaborate on how your department seeks to do this because DEL has hired hundreds and hundreds of interns over the years who have never been bsorbed permanently, instead they are trained and equipped with skills only to be sent home after 2 years. Doesn't this contradict the mission and vision, because instead of providing sustainable employment, young graduates are taught skills and sent back home to sit with those skills. As it stands, PES deployment counsellors over the years have been shuffled every 2 years, with no permanent employment in sight. They help out with the UIF clients because there's a shortage of CSOs, the better solution would be to absorb those interns. There are PES and UIF CSO posts which have been advertised since last year but none of those interns have been shortlisted or employed despite sending countless applications.
These interns already have the experience, they have been exposed to all DEL units and their system, they know the department inside and out, which gives them an advantage over many, yet they are still not even given first preference. In the North West province, the PES deployment counsellors made history by putting that province on the map, they put PES unit on the map by exceeding expectations and targets, placing them at position 1 and 2 respectively, some of the interns even made it to the national list, which has never happened before, yet the only thing those interns received for their hard work was award and participation certificates.
At the awards ceremony held in Mpumalanga in December 2025, the Deputy Minister promised that PES deployment counsellors will be absorbed, as he was handing out awards to best performers, this has not happened yet.
For the past two years, DEL have been advertising CSO and Admin Clerk posts, which required no experience.
May I recommend that you make these interns your priority and hire them permanently. They are already in the Essa database, it will be easy to find them and place them. I am not saying ignore HR process, the interns can undergo interviews however the advantage they have is that they know the work, meaning the department will spend less time and money training them but instead they will hit the ground running and help the UIF unit with UIF applications.