More than 230,000 applications received for 6,044 posts advertised in top 15 Nasi iSpani programme

More than 230,000 job applications have been received for the 6,044 posts advertised in the top 15 on the Nasi iSpani recruitment programme, Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi said on Tuesday.

The road and transport department (6,000 posts) received the most applications at 27,873, the community safety department (one post) received 25,508 applications and the agricultural and rural development (one post) received 20,816.

The total number of applications received was 234,134.

According to the number of applications by race received for all the jobs including the top 15, about 1.5-million were black applicants, he said.

“We’ve concluded all the administrative tasks of capturing all applications. We are ready to resume with public shortlisting from August 20 and public interviews. We are working on the best available mechanism,” said Lesufi.

“We intend to start appointing successful candidates (outside the top 15 highest applied vacancies) and possibly conclude by September 25. We will issue appointment letters to all successful applicants in an open and transparent manner.”

Last month, Lesufi said 1.2-million applications were received for the 8,000 jobs advertised on the programme.

“Unfortunately, which is very sad, for the 8,000 posts we advertised we received 1,230,092 applications. Of that total, 1,171,035 were applications received online. Through paper-based and mass centres we received 59,057 applications. These are the people who went to community halls,” he said.

Lesufi said 44% of the applications are from males and 55% from females, while 1% didn't declare their gender.

“They have the right not to declare their gender. As expected, 98.8% of the applicants are Africans,” he said.

The Nasi iSpani initiative is set to hand out 6,000 new jobs a month until July 2024, according to Lesufi.

“We didn't want to issue appointment letters via e-mail because e-mails can be hijacked and taken to a wrong person. We didn't want to do it in the corners. We didn't want to do it in the offices because people can take your appointment letter and give it to their friends. We wanted to give it here [at the stadium], open to everyone.

“When we appoint in our offices, we are accused of lack of transparency and appointing politically connected. When we are transparent and open, we are accused of grandstanding.”

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