‘Nothing short of a skills revolution by a nation united will extricate us from the crisis we face … The most fatal constraint to shared growth is skills,” said Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka at the launch of the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa).
In this era of historically unprecedented movement of people and the deliberate recruitment of skilled personnel the deputy president may be looking in the wrong places to remedy the skills shortages. While South Africa should welcome back expatriates and develop strategies to make it easier for those who wish to return, this is not the solution in the long term. Nor is government intervention and agreement with raiding countries or bringing back retirees.
In the search for skills, a wide range of expertise will be needed. South Africa will not be able to produce this immediately.
The higher education sector cannot meet the shortage of skills required. According to a report titled The Post-Apartheid South African Labour Market by the development policy research unit at the University of Cape Town, published in April last year, the unemployment rate of “degreed African and white workers” has increased from 18 000 in 1995 to more than 44 000 today. The report states that despite a skills shortage in South Africa there are increasing numbers of highly educated people without employment.
South Africa will be well advised to take into account the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) seminal report, released in South Africa in December last year, about the benefits of international migration and the attendant brain drain of some of Africa’s most qualified personnel. The brain drain is fuelled by “skills raiding”, a well-organised system that the advanced economies use to quickly replenish their labour shortages. These countries use highly sophisticated recruitment agencies to attract the best qualified individuals.
The GCIM report notes that there are now almost 200-million international migrants, a number equivalent to the fifth most populous country on earth, Brazil. While migrants make valuable economic, political, social and cultural contributions to the society they have left behind, in the form of remittances sent home, that migration can also result in the departure of the country’s brightest, best educated and most entrepreneurial citizens. Africa is particularly devastated by the loss of highly skilled people.
The large numbers of educated people leaving Africa, according to a World Bank study titled International Migration, Remittances and the Brain Drain, published in October last year, reveals the enormity of the loss to poor African countries. The figures for college-educated citizens living abroad are: Ghana — 47%, Mozambique — 45%, Kenya — 38%, Angola — 33% and Somalia — 33%.
The report says that the “exodus of skilled workers is a symptom of deep economic, social and political problems in their homelands and can prove particularly crippling in much-needed professions in healthcare and education”. In KwaZulu-Natal alone, there are more than 26 000 vacancies for medical specialists and practioners, pharmacists and emergency workers according a report released by the director general of health at a recent Department of Health indaba in Durban.
Some scholars believe that the brain drain may fuel the vicious cycle of underdevelopment and cost poor countries the very people who are able to resist corruption and bad governance. Devesh Kapur and John McHale argue in their book, Give us Your Best and Brightest, published by the Centre of Global Development, a Washington DC-based organisation, that the loss of institution builders, hospital managers, university department heads and political reformers could trap countries in poverty.
The GCIM is concerned that migration has generally not been considered an integral component of the development agenda. It emphasises the fact that developing countries have to adjust to the realities of a competitive global economy and coherent migration policies are an integral part of the process. This is the real challenge in post-apartheid South Africa.
Developing a coherent and targeted strategy to meet skills gaps is tied to the fact that South Africa is a continental leader in the provision of high-quality tertiary education relevant to the demands of a rapidly globalising, competitive, information-driven world. These skills are readily transferable and in high demand in industrialised countries. South Africa is the number one host country for international students in Africa and compares favourably with the rest of the world. But South Africa has not developed a coherent policy to welcome international students as potential job seekers, as other countries are doing. South Africa must be part of the race to attract the best brains.
In developing the ability to attract skills quickly, South Africa needs to take into consideration that industrialised countries are also experiencing brain drain. Europe is becoming “demographically weak”, having problems with its tax base, growing difficulties in funding the welfare state and experiencing a shrinking global market. There is an emerging realisation of the need to attract interest from highly educated foreigners in order to maintain growth of Europe’s knowledge economy.
Many countries simplified their immigration laws to facilitate the entry of skilled workers and in some cases to offer international students work and/or residence permits upon graduation. Australia, for example, adopted a measure allowing international students studying information and communications technology to apply for permanent residence from within the country without the requirement of previous professional experience and without necessarily being sponsored by an Australian employer. Australia is currently planning a drive to recruit 20 000 skilled workers.
Skills raiding is aided and abetted by a deliberate immigration strategy that has been designed to encourage growth in international student numbers as a way of attracting potential skilled workers. Similar policies have been adopted by Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Roshen Kishun is the director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal International Education Association of South Africa and a member of the Immigration Advisory Board (2003-2005)
What South Africa can do
In managing the need to import skills, the task team put together by Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka will need to develop a coherent human resource database quantifying specialist skills required in government sectors and business.
The nascent initiatives to “ensure integrated human resource development planning and implementation” between the departments of trade and industry, education and labour and business are essential if the supply and demand sides of the skills shortages are to be managed. In addition, South Africa needs to develop a data base of professionals/students and others leaving the country and a coherent policy on internationalisation of its tertiary education sector to enable the country to attract the best and the brightest.
The task teams will need to map out a comprehensive recruitment strategy to compete globally for people with high-level skills. The recruitment drive must go beyond individual minister’s initiatives in seeking to identify skills needs in their particular departments. The recruitment strategy should take into account the fact that South Africa can attract skilled people in the healthcare profession precisely because of experiences that only the South African environment can provide. The drive should tap into the skills pool that exists in other countries that wish to make South Africa their home.
As an advanced industrial economy, South Africa needs to work with the reality that it is both a sending and receiving country that brings complexity to the push/pull factors and the policy/regulatory issues. In this context, skills requirement needs to be managed by an immigration policy that is not viewed in narrow nationalistic terms, but as a powerful public policy instrument that will benefit the country and the region. South Africa will need to move away from past immigration history and accept the fact that it will be competing for skills in the global context.
The preamble to the current Immigration Act of 2002 states that the South African economy may have access at all times “to the full measure of needed contributions by foreigners”. South Africa will need to develop a sophisticated immigration instrument to facilitate the entry of skilled workers while ensuring that programmes are in place to train and retain locals. It will need to develop world-class services, deal with the ineptitude of officials and streamline the bureaucratic management for entry into the country. — Roshen Kishun