Ferial Haffajee
Emigration lawyer Hilliard Kassel is laughing all the way to the bank. He jokes that the only reason he stays in South Africa is because his skill in helping people to leave is in such demand.
Based in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs, the bespectacled lawyer is at the cutting edge of the migratory wave – his client list is expanding and of late it is being fuelled by fear.
Many people come to him after being hijacked or robbed – many are professionals or graduates or own businesses. Many are not white.
“The decreasing rand has given a new impetus,” he says, adding that often his clients fear that the cost of emigrating will in three years time be beyond their pockets.
Lawyers fees, landing rights and the containers which carry your possessions over the seas must be paid for in hard currencies.
The brain drain. The chicken run. Call it what you like, the migration of skills from South Africa is growing – and with it, the country’s tax base is being eroded at a time when we can scarcely afford it.
Business is feeling the pinch. The crunch is felt in information technology and finance. “To hire a young chartered accountant is difficult because they’re all in London,” says one executive.
The skills lost are not easily replaced and what is happening instead, the executive adds, is that “everybody’s chasing a smaller and smaller pool of highly qualified young South Africans who are getting more and more expensive”.
Skills can’t be imported either, because South African companies can’t afford the dollar-based salaries which IT specialists, investment managers and chartered accountants can command in this global economy.
Skilled South Africans are joining a continental drift. Many African countries have for decades been denuded of their skills base in the same way. There are more doctors from Sierra Leone practising in Chicago than in the entire West African state.
In South Africa, legend has it that there are more Zimbabwean and Nigerian engineers working at Telkom than the full complement employed in their countries.
And soon, there could be more South African doctors living in California than in Cape Town – local studies have shown that almost 500 doctors have left in the past three years.
“Most African countries have failed to institutionalise and therefore destroyed their skills base,” says Kole Omotoso, a Nigerian academic and author living in South Africa. “A doctor friend of mine left Nigeria because he couldn’t get oxygen for his patient.”
A nuclear physicist left because although he could import all the equipment he needed, it was rendered useless with the regular electricity and water cuts Nigerians live with.
When the state fails in this way, it is those with skills – a middle class if you like – who pack up and leave.
What’s left behind is the elite and a massive underclass with no prospect of employment. The poor cannot depend on the state. They return to stokvels (in the absence of banking systems), sangomas (where there’s no health care) and subsistence farming (because the only way to eat is to grow your own food). The wabenzis in turn fly in the best food, jet out for foreign health care and buy private security.
It is a scary picture. But one which is not nearly on South Africa’s horizons, believes Omotoso. He says the government should bid those who want to go: “Wasalaam” – go in peace (although this week the message has been more good riddance from President Nelson Mandela).
This country has an infrastructure, a banking system and a thriving private sector which can be developed and expanded. “Most African countries don’t offer those alternatives. You can only work in the public sector,” Omotoso says.
To avoid the trap of the two-class state, many contemporary economists believe that a middle class must be carefully nurtured. Although anathema to many on the left, this middle class of teachers, clerks and foremen at the lower levels, and professionals like doctors, accountants and lawyers at the upper rungs, is what keeps a country going.
Says Omotoso: “It’s the middle class that contributes to the state and demands that the state works. The salvation of South Africa will be the middle class.”
Vincent Williams of the South African Migration Project in Cape Town is putting the finishing touches on a survey which will assess the extent of the damage of the brain drain in Southern Africa. “It’s not just about capital flight. Countries are losing human resources which can contribute to development.”
In the long term, the loss of skills must be countered by training; in the short term, South Africa must buy those skills by offering tax incentives to foreign workers or by attracting businesses in similar ways, says Williams.
But with the levels of xenophobia growing across all spheres of society, tax breaks for foreign workers are not going to be an easy achievement. Director of the Government Communication and Information Service Joel Netshitenzhe believes the exodus is likely to reach its ceiling and adds that many government departments are looking at new ways of retaining skills.
He adds that “in a free world of high mobility, you cannot stop people seeking lucrative offers elsewhere”.