SA’s worsening skills haemorrhage

For all its obvious failures and shortcomings, Africa has an unrivalled ability to enchant. It grabs hard and doesn’t let go.

When Out of Africa author Karen Blixen returned to her native Denmark after 17 years in Kenya, she was devastated. Migration, as the research shows, is a booster jab against economic anaemia.

While the ANC government pays lip service to the concept, the reality is different. Every obstacle is seemingly placed before foreigners who seek to contribute to the country’s growth.

There’s a critical skills list (CSL) that is meant to facilitate the speedy entry of desperately needed skills. SA, theoretically, has put out the bureaucratic welcome mat to chefs, advertising fundis and digital artists but is no longer interested in medical specialists, nor electrical, mechanical, metallurgical, mining and civil engineers – all on the previous CSL.

ALSO READ: South Africans with skills and cash are continuing to bleed out of SA

It’s pretty much the same thing with overseas project investment, which President Cyril Ramaphosa is supposedly moving heaven and earth to obtain

I recently met a French couple who have invested about R15 million in developing a small farm they bought in 2013.

They are also setting up a pharmaceutical project – bringing in around R400 million in initial foreign investment – that will export to the European Union.

Despite every effort, over nine years they have been unable to get anything better than three-month tourist visas. That means they are in a perpetual shuttle between SA and France – they have to return to their home country for renewal – at great cost and inconvenience. But it’s South Africa that holds their hearts, so they slog away at it. For now.

As difficult as we make it for new immigrants – we torch the spaza shops of Somalians in Cape Town and murder Zimbabwean truck drivers on the N3 – the ANC is also sublimely indifferent to retaining the skills and financial assets of South Africans themselves.

Driven by the political advantages to the ANC of cadre employment and nepotism, black economic empowerment and restorative affirmative action have moved far beyond their initial, admirable intentions.

The result has been a substantial increase in emigration by Indians, whites and coloureds, as well as by black South Africans.

A recent BusinessLIVE analysis hints at the scale of the exodus. American Dream, which specialises in the EB-5 investment visa programme, is booming.

Despite the minimum investment increasing from $500 000 (about R7.3 million) to $900,000 two years ago, it has been processing 100 investors a year and 2021 will surpass that, with a threefold increase in inquiries since the pandemic.

The Induku Group is currently processing the exit of around 160 professionals to the US. Many are in the medical sector, concerned over the NHI. Others are lawyers, engineers and entrepreneurs who are so desperate that they are willing to take entry-level jobs – hotel reception, line chefs, courier deliveries and packing containers – to get that coveted green card.

The Homecoming Revolution somewhat desperately and unconvincingly tries to reassure us that there had been a 30-45% uptick in “returning home’ conversations among South Africans abroad. And “anecdotal evidence suggests that the Covid lockdown exacerbated homesickness among expats”.

Like Karen Blixen, these people are dealing with the loss of a loved land. But it’s unlikely that their packing cases will be heading back to the southern tip any time soon.

William Saunderson-Meyer