South Africa is haemorrhaging skills at a rate of 10 times its ability to import skills. This has to be cause for concern, especially as official figures have to be optimistic. Forex regulations encourage permanent émigrés to fib — forex allowances for emigration are much less generous than for temporary sojourns abroad.
As a South African academic, I felt the need to build experience offshore. I saw an Australian job advertisement. A few e-mails later, and I was invited for an interview. Once an offer was made, it was a formality to get not only a work permit, but permanent residence. My brain gets a much-needed holiday. The Australians think I am a workaholic, and I get to build “international experience”, which for some reason always looks good on a CV and might even translate into something useful in my ability to contribute in South Africa. So there are gains all round, yet immigration and emigration are seen in South Africa as matters of high patriotism or xenophobia, depending on your perspective.
Contrast my ease of relocating to Oz with the situation in South Africa (my post remains vacant six months after I left), where work permits are very hard to arrange, and permanent residence next to impossible.
Can it be any surprise that the net loss of skilled people is so high?
What is the government doing wrong?
There are several issues that deter skilled immigration, while making South Africa both unattractive as a place to do skilled work, and lacking in capacity to develop skills.
First, the government has half-heartedly embraced globalisation. It accepts the logic of opening markets, so it also has to recognise that skills are a global commodity, and wealthy countries have no compunction about strip-mining poorer countries of skills. The new immigration policy has made some things easier (assuming the new law takes effect), but is still based on the flawed premise that importing a foreigner means putting a South African out of work. The proposal in the new immigration law that companies must train staff as the price for bringing in a skilled immigrant is rubbish. The skills we most need are those that go with an advanced education and experience — not a six-week in-house training programme. In any case, a business is not the best environment for developing skills. If immigration is equated with a skills shortage, why not work harder at building education?
Second, South Africa is not an attractive environment for skilled work.
The government’s irrational stance on HIV and Aids is but one example of a strongly anti-intellectual bias from the top. Worse, South Africa is not a society that appreciates a job well done. A big issue that I found in practice made it very hard to focus on the high-skill aspect of my work is the general malaise in the “service” sector. I found myself spending up to half my time chasing after errors in accounts and failure to deliver services as promised. This malaise extends to the private sector; I came to dread dealing with an insurance claim, or signing a contract for any kind of service. Perhaps it’s just me: I can’t leave a half-baked piece of work undone, even if it’s someone else’s job — but the general attitude of sloppiness cannot contribute to an atmosphere of appreciating a skilled job — and hence job satisfaction for the skilled. An important effect of this don’t care attitude is that it sabotages processes necessary for building a local skills base — improving education, replacing the apartheid-inspired hierarchy by one based on appropriate skills for the job, and turning around the apartheid-era view of jobs especially in the public service as sinecures for the well-connected.
Third, higher education is under threat. The restructuring of universities and technikons is a positive step, if a bit late; hundreds of millions of rand have been wasted on non-viable institutions, while the country’s best institutions have decayed. A society that invests in intellectual resources is spoken of, but not embraced.
Corporatisation of academia, in which everything has to have a utilitarian economic goal, is making South Africa an increasingly unpleasant place to be an academic. My own field, computer science, has suffered an additional blow. The new higher education funding model, which has received almost no publicity in the face of the trauma of restructuring, cuts government funding for computer science students by 40%, to less than half that of other laboratory sciences.
It seems our government must needs shoot itself in both feet: once by copying fads that don’t make sense, and the other by refusing to go with trends which do.
What can be done?
A big issue that the government and society as a whole has to grasp is evaluating reality against goals. It is no use to talk about an information society, then cut funding for computer science students. It is no good to talk about the need to compete globally, then put yourself at a huge disadvantage by making skilled immigration harder than in a developed country.
Immigration policy needs to be more realistic. If we wring our hands in horror at the cost of producing a medical graduate, who scarpers to wealthier climes, why should we not conversely be ecstatic that we have scored a skilled immigrant at the expense of taxpayers in another part of the world? There is no way that an open immigration policy for skilled immigrants will take away jobs. If skilled emigrants outnumber skilled immigrants by a factor of 10, we can’t educate and train people fast enough to make up the difference.
Higher education needs to be seen as a resource, rather than a drain on society. The countries with the most successful economies also happen to be those which have not messed with the traditions of higher education, developed over millenia. Those countries also happen to be skills magnets. What’s more, they also happen to be employing an increasingly high fraction of the skilled people produced by South African academic institutions.
Finally, the culture of non-work in the service sector needs to be addressed. Aside from personal frustrations such as mine, the cost to the economy of a skilled person standing in queues for hours is not trivial. Further, South Africa is a society lacking a sense of national pride, except in ephemeral situations, like winning a major ball game.
No society has ever succeeded without a strong sense of national self-esteem — and South Africa is not going to achieve that with a don’t care attitude.
It all seems pretty obvious — but none of this represents great photo-ops for the politicians — except possibly the notion of building national pride. But even that is too easily subverted to trivia like winning an Olympics or World Cup bid: easy solutions which in the end achieve very little. Perhaps it’s to be expected that when problems appear to be impossibly hard, a trivial solution is grasped at. Win a World Cup bid, offer to stage the Olympics — but don’t put serious thought into the skills crisis.
But the hard problems are solvable. It’s just a matter of having the will to face up to them. And that requires a change in mindset from the government, where skilled but critical members of civil society would be seen as allies, not a threat to fragile egos.
Philip Machanick is a South African academic at the University of Queensland, Brisbane
Related:
Brain drain to brain gain
03 February 2002