Migration migraine

By Cees Bruggemans, Chief Economist FNB
17 January 2008

South Africa has known many invasions.

Most of South Africa's early history probably saw many unrecorded migrations.

More recent arrivals include the modern waves of incoming Bantu pastoralists some two millennia ago. After a long interval these were followed by waves of White settlers, Dutch, German and French, at first from small beginnings in the 17th century, then followed by more ambitious English invasions in the 19th century.

The Dutch brought Malays to the Cape. The English brought indentured Indians to Natal, although some of such migrants came under their own steam.

Indeed, over the past 150 years marking the period of our development into a modern mining, urban industrial and then post-industrial society, the arrivals have been from everywhere, mainly from all over Africa, Europe and English-speaking settler countries. Latin America, the Middle East and most of Asia other than India have contributed little, although Chinese arrivals have been increasing of late.

If this, roughly, is a pen sketch of the immigrations that have created a polyglot nation in Southern Africa, there also have been many outward migrations.

An early Black movement happened during Shaka's time, when Mzilikazi absconded to the north, populating today's western Zimbabwe. Even earlier, in the Western part of the country, some of the dispersing Koisan also moved north.

White South Africans have been moving away from these shores from their earliest beginnings. Often this has just been a matter of failed migration. Traditionally, many arrivals never find their feet, and when the means exist people do tend to move away again quite quickly.

Of course, in many instances such means don't exist, cutting off all escape routes once having migrated, though sometimes this factor only applies on a generation basis (a subsequent generation having acquired new means and belatedly deciding to move away).

Other instances of outward migration are of a different push-and-pull variety. A foreign posting here may have only been temporary (it even applied to Van Riebeeck), other parts of the world ultimately offering more interesting challenges. But this also often applied to the offspring of long-term immigrants, who may have found their talents better deployed at a global level, or simply feeling a closer affiliation with the source culture, a pull that may ultimately be very powerful.

Disagreement with authority, as much Dutch as English, Zulu, Afrikaner and ANC, has been another reason pushing people offshore.

Mzilikazi's move can be so interpreted, followed within a decade by the Afrikaner Great Trek trying to escape British authority. Following the Boer War, some Afrikaners didn't want to stay, a few even emigrating to Argentina.

The 1948 change in government, and the apartheid regime that then followed, for decades pushed people off-shore, many dissident English and a few Afrikaners, and Black, Coloured and Indian exiles. This has been more a process of decades rather than an event, but a drain nonetheless.

But the net effect of all these migrations, inward and outward, has been the same. Mostly vigorous, talented people came and left. Their arrival was mostly a huge gain, their departure mostly a huge loss to this country, a brain drain as it is to any country experiencing such losses.

It is on this score that the past two decades come into focus, bearing in mind these earlier episodes.

By 1990, South Africa had created a modern post-industrial urban setting, even as a majority of its people was still mired in dismal poverty and rural underdevelopment.

Social engineering (apartheid) distorted allocation of scarce labour skills and talent. In addition, the quality of education offered to the majority of the population left much to be desired, given modern development ambitions.

The coming of the 1994 political watershed had many consequences. A hugely beneficial one was the freeing up of society, encouraging a better allocation of scarce skills and talent. But back-to-back there was a new preferment. And marking the change was much trepidation about the long-term future, at least among some.

Just as much as the coming of the English in 1806 would lead within a generation to the Great Trek (things moved more slowly then), and the coming of Afrikaner nationalists in 1948 was a signal for some English-speakers to call it a day, just so 1994's political upheaval initiated an immediate response, also because the means today are so much more accommodating than they were then.

The outward wave that got underway in the 1990s was fed by many considerations. There was political trepidation as to future realities. But close on its heels was a new discrimination, not unlike the early 1800s, early 1900s or early 1950s, sometimes pushing people out of work or preventing their natural progressing in favour of others newly affirmed.

But in the decade from the mid-1990s two more factors were to feature prominently in pushing people of all hues offshore. The one was virulent, violent crime. The other was deteriorating public services, in particular education and health care.

These were again big erosions of talented people this country could hardly afford to lose, given our development ambitions.

Our economic revival post-1994 was at first slow in taking hold, but from 2003 onward it became spectacular, yet it ultimately did not stem the steady loss of talent.

How else to explain 40 000 South Africans whooping it up in Dubai today, entirely a modern day phenomenon, or the security personnel making a living in Iraq or the steady erosion to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, America, Western Europe?

All of that is bad enough, when considering an economy with enormous development challenges, yet with its skilled labour pool stretched to the limit. And this with an education system 14 years after apartheid ended still delivering only 15% university exemptions in its annual school cohort attempting matric (itself only half its age cohort, the other half having mostly dropped out earlier at primary school level).

Yet recent weeks may well have seen yet another outward push forming, one we can't afford yet may not be able to prevent.

In recent weeks, there has been much speculation about the direction future economic policy could be taking. Not everyone will be welcoming such possible future changes with equal enthusiasm. This Christmas, in many a family setting, there may have been intense discussion as to what this means and where this may lead. Remembrances of Christmases past these past two centuries?

It certainly didn't help that the policy choices of the past two decades then also came to a head in a wave of electricity blackouts.

If the coast was more spared than Johannesburg over this festive season (last year it was the Cape, remember), and many revelers refused to even think about politics, preferring instead to recharge the batteries in weeks of relaxation, reality dawned quick enough in the opening weeks of January.

The return to work didn't only coincide with judicial spectacles or the worsening traffic congestion. It specifically was put under the whip of daily electricity interruptions.

Most urban South Africans run small businesses, or work for an employer. They all are dependent on electricity, from the petrol attendant to the seamstress and the computer user. Cut the juice and you cut the lifeblood of a modern economy.

The doubts as to where all this is leading must have multiplied greatly in recent weeks, especially after announcements suggesting that electricity interruptions will be with us for at least ten years.

One can buy expensive diesel generators and sun roof panels all you want, but that won't plug all the leaks.

The greatest frustration can be observed in the traffic. Here are all these people, with every modern communication gadget that money can buy, in their sometimes truly fancy cars, all reduced to immobility.

Good manners go out of the window, two weeks into the New Year. Traversing an intersection without working traffic lights has become a daunting gauntlet. Who has the greater bravura in challenging the other drivers?

Priorities, clearly, need some brushing up, as well as organizing for disaster, as much among the victims as among those serving us.

Eskom was prevented from building new power stations for many years, though asking to be allowed to do so. Affirmative action policies have often led to the loss of skilled labour, especially in the public sector.

Unless the economy were to shrink 5% or 10% shortly, the shortage of electricity is going to remain a reality for as many years as what it will take authority to boost generating capacity to sufficient levels once again.

The cost and inconvenience could be substantial.

For some, this may just not be worth it. Talent is in huge demand worldwide. South Africa can hardly afford losing even a single set of skills, never mind hundreds of thousands. Yet the drain could well swell anew in coming years.

One hopes the new political leadership will take cognisance of these worrying tendencies. Only paying attention to the education system won't be good enough. Like the electricity grid, it may take decades to get right.

More fundamentally, we need better allocation of scarce labour talent, and giving it a reason to stay on, even in these trying times.

Indeed, where is the sense of more Cuban, Tunisian and Indian medical personnel, if our own want to decamp wholesale? And that applies just as much to good teachers, accountants, engineers, plumbers, electricians, computer specialists, lawyers, marketers, even civil servants and municipal workers.

We need more encouragement for talent to stay, rather than dreaming up new schemes that will induce them to leave even faster than what they are already doing.