For a long time, the SA public sector has identified the risk of a retiring force of experienced engineers, and insufficient succession planning

This is true in many fields - energy, water, transport, planning etc. No steady pipeline of skills being developed from graduate level all the way up to that person who knows how everything was designed, built, fixed, patched etc. And has implicit know-how of project processes...

Institutional systems, places, etc. This has been a risk identified in many a government departmental planning exercise...

Know-how is different from knowledge. Knowledge can be read in book or manual, and can be transferred like that. But you can’t automatically apply it to every complex process and event as it occurs.

Know-how incorporates that “implicit” information, that can’t easily be transferred from brain to paper to brain. It’s acquired on the job.

I’m a big fan of economic development, team development, and crisis-response (or “everything as fast as possible”) theories that incorporate the importation of know-how.

You want to start the first ever tomato sauce factory in your country? Go hire someone who’s worked in one somewhere else. He’ll know why the glass bottle pops at a certain temperature - you’ll take years to figure that out. It won’t be in the glass bottle manual.

Anyway, clearly this thread is not about tomato sauce but about Cuban engineers. I do believe that SA has a lot of unemployed graduate engineers with knowledge - but not know-how. A part of the Cuban deal should be to match each them with 3-4 of these graduates (& a translator!)

If, however, these Cuban engineers are junior, or if relevant engineering bodies can tangibly demonstrate that we do have unemployed experienced (know-how not knowledge) engineers, then I don’t understand what we are doing?

Just bring back the people you retired too early? Or kicked out because they got in the way of corruption? Or...?