Brain drain: More South Africans seeking greener pastures

While South Africa struggles through load shedding and a fragile economy, crime and corruption, talented and skilled South Africans are leaving South Africa to look for greener pastures.

Recently an expert in environmental crime said he planned to leave the country.

“It isn’t formal yet. I am still busy applying for a skills visa at the British Embassy. My sons also applied,” he said.

The expert said his daughter was approved and on her way to the UK this year. “I am hoping me and wife can join her by the end of the year,” he said.

Fed up with South Africa

He said he was fed up with the corruption in the country. “There is no future here, my children can’t find jobs. The country has a puncture and there’s no repair kit,” he said.

The expert said he would only return to South Africa to visit the wild, but that was about it.

“There will be a brain drain in South Africa, especially an academic brain drain. We can’t carry on like this, the cost of living, the water crisis, the power crisis, the petrol crisis, the tax crisis. It doesn’t end,” he said.

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The expert said the main reason for leaving was that his son couldn’t find work in SA.

“It’s madness. We can’t carry on like this, there is no future here,” he said.

Better opportunities elsewhere

Bianca Coetzee said they left South Africa four years ago for her husband’s work and has never looked back.

“We have lived in Nigeria for three years and now in Ghana for the past year. We live in rural Ghana on a plantation. It’s nothing fancy, but we have power every day, uninterrupted,” she said.

Coetzee said their data and their DStv subscription were also cheaper. “There are so many opportunities here,” she said.

“It might become our forever home. I miss South Africa, but I am not willing to adapt to it again,” she said.

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Safety a concern

Rianda Fourie said she wanted to leave South Africa for Iceland. She said she has been researching immigration because life was not improving in South Africa.

“I am concerned about our safety; we are not safe here anymore. The government has failed us and the police have failed us,” she said.

Political analyst Piet Croucamp thought the genetic history of all of South Africa was nomadic.

“In the past, we would have moved from one position to another because it suited our survival better. We now fly or drive to different ecologies because it suits our survival better,” he said.

“It applies to us. I can go anywhere because the conditions in South Africa suit me and I want to be here. But it doesn’t apply to my children. I don’t want my children to be stuck here.”

Croucamp said there was nothing as bad as being stuck in conditions undermining your survival with no alternative to migrate to another ecology. “If you want to emigrate, do so if that is what it takes to maximise the qualities of the human condition personally,” he said.

Croucamp said he spoke to a 30-year-old who earns R1.5 million annually farming in the United States. “He will never be able to do so in South Africa,” he said.

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Stay in SA, but work abroad

Economist Dawie Roodt said many people were skipping the country for better opportunities abroad.

“It isn’t always necessary to leave the country. The world economy is digitalising. So if you have the right skills, an internet connection and you are safe, it’s lekker in South Africa,” he said, adding that many people don’t leave the country but work abroad.

Victimologist Professor Jaco Barkhuizen said he knows of a very prominent profiler specialising in serial rape now working in England. “There’s no chance of him returning. I know about many colleagues working abroad because of the crime and the electricity,” he said.

Barkhuizen said it was understandable that experts applied for work abroad with the high unemployment rate in South Africa.