QUALIFIED South Africans – include information technology (IT) experts, engineers, senior business staff, doctors, nurses and teachers – are leaving the country in droves, endangering the country’s fragile future, say migration consultants.
The economic impact of the brain-drain has not yet been closely analysed, but experts say it could be massive in a country restructuring its economy after the apartheid years, and where an HIV/Aids pandemic is hitting qualified workers hard, especially teachers and nurses.
“You are seeing the cream of the intelligentsia leaving this country,” says John Gambarana, a consultant with the International Immigration Alliance (IIA) in Johannesburg. “We are losing our best brains.”
In 1999, for the sixth year in a row, South Africa had a net outflow of some 4,000 people – 8 402 emigrants against 3 669 immigrants, according to Statistics South Africa. But those are the official figures, and migration experts say the real number of those leaving is at least three times higher.
The University of Cape Town recently studied emigration to the five most popular destinations – Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States – and reported that close to a quarter of a million South Africans had settled in those countries between 1989 and 1997.
Gambarana?s office helps 35 to 40 families emigrate each month, and opposition Global Visas is now processing some 55 families a month, up from 35 a year ago.
Both say the number of those wanting to leave has risen since 1996-98, a relatively steady period following “the great white fear” of 1994 when a black majority government came to power for the first time amid (unfulfilled) white expectations of a racial bloodbath.
Those leaving all voice the same concerns, the consultants say: fear of the violent crime prevalent in South Africa; worries over the cost and quality of health and schooling; and uncertainty over job prospects for themselves and their children in the face of “affirmative action”.
The exodus is not just white.
“When I hold a seminar in Durban, I am besieged by Indian professionals; in Cape Town by disenchanted coloured (mixed-race) people; here [in Johannesburg] I’ve young black IT whizz-kids wanting to go to the United States,” Gambarana said.
The outflow is sharpened by an acute shortage of professionals in such developed countries as Britain and Ireland, who are only too happy to allow South Africans to fill the vacant posts at salaries undreamed of here. – AFP