On Friday, 12 August, at the Presidential Imbizo and Oversight Visit in Gauteng, the Minister of Social Development, Lindiwe Zulu, made a statement which resulted in backlash from the Unemployed Social Workers Movement of South Africa (USWMSA).
The minister recently stated that workers who have gone through the Department’s Scholarship Programme will find work, not only through the Department of Social Development (DSD) and other departments, but also through the private sector.
Members of the USWMSA took issue with this statement, saying that Zulu and the DSD are discriminating against social workers who have not gone through the Scholarship Programme, and are instead favouring those who have.
The USWMSA has said only employing social work graduates who have gone through the Programme "breeds unfairness and discrimination."
"This means that NSFAS-funded or self-funded social workers will never be recognized," said one USWMSA member. They continued, saying that everytime the Minister addresses the issue, she's always said "the social workers who are trained by DSD."
Not all of us were funded; some of us were self-funded as far as NSFAS and other forms of funding. But, the Minister doesn't recognize us, so at this time we feel like we are left out. She wants to cause a division among us, which is not good, she's not going to win with that.
The Minister has since issued a statement via the Department of Social Development on Wednesday, 17 August, clarifying her remarks and labelling her words as "misconstrued".
"The Ministry of Social Development has noted comments on the social media platforms that has misconstrued Minister Zulu’s remarks as employment discrimination against unemployed social workers that were self-funded or funded through other means in favour of unemployed social work graduates that were funded through the Department’s Social Work Bursaries. Yet nothing could be further from the truth," read the statement.
In fact, on the day in question, Minister Zulu indicated that the Department of Social Development is working jointly with other Departments and the National Treasury on a sector-wide strategy to absorb all unemployed social work graduates in other sectors of Government, including Health, Police and Basic Education.
The statement continued, affirming that just because the Minister mentioned DSD-funded unemployed social work graduates, does not mean that she is "oblivious" to those self-funded students, desperately seeking employment.
South Africa is currently facing a social worker shortage, with many social worker graduates battling to find employment. Government departments have hit their mark with the number of social workers they can employ, leaving the rest to job hunt on their own.
To address the shortage of social workers, the Government set up the Social Work Scholarship Programme, which provides funding to certain students.
However, beneficiaries of the programme have not been placed in the Department of Social Development or in the Department of Basic Education to be sent to schools where they are needed, due to "budget restraints across the whole of Government," said Zulu.
“We are working with sector departments and the National Treasury to address the plight of all unemployed social workers in the country, especially given the socio-economic challenges and social ills that require interventions by social service professionals and levels of unemployment amongst young people in the country”, said the Minister.
