Looking abroad to hear the good news story
AN ADVERT in last month’s edition of the SA Medical Journal offers job opportunities with the option of permanent and temporary contracts for medical doctors in Canada and Ireland.
I would imagine other professional journals carry similar overseas job placement adverts for engineers, IT specialists, academics, scientists and health-care workers.
Decision-making in any country, particularly a developing 21-year old democracy, is a complex and often infuriating process. Yet, which voices should matter most in moulding an individual’s destiny: the voices of those who feel for the country or those who live in it?
Ideally, both categories should be co-markers. And by and large, they are. Western money may be good but western social attitudes are dubious. However since 2000, and particularly since technology and globalisation made the world a much smaller place, Africa has been confronted with a new reality: the diaspora.
However much the new emigrés love their country and wave the flag on the occasions when Bafana, the Proteas or Springboks win a match, life in their adopted country confronts them incessantly.
It isn’t merely the Green Card, and ultimately, the coveted blue American or a red British passport, that makes them feel an asset. It matters to them that their self-worth is recognised and acknowledged.
In Parliament there is an English disease, now peculiar to our new political class, of using language to mask feelings, intentions and partisan preferences rather than express them. Afrikaners have known to be different.
Trade and industry minister Rob Davies has been busy rewriting employment equity planning regulations which aggrieves Indians and coloureds (who fall under the black rubric) and whites. They maintain that the measure to use national race demography in equity plans is effectively a quota system that meddles with nationhood.
The Constitutional Court verdict ruled last year against policewoman Renate Barnard, and found the SAPS equity plan was a restitution measure in line with the constitution, and the Employment Equity Act should end a very troubled chapter of our employment history and not initiate a new discord.
For decades, South Africa has been characterised by sharp and often growing inequalities and divides.
Some aspects of inequality and exclusion are wellknown and widely discussed.
Ask a suitably-qualified teacher or a policeman with over 25 or more years of experience why he or she despairs of the future, and the responses invariably focus on inequalities from the angle of exclusion in important areas of promotion, career advancement and gender.
Indian teachers were highly regarded for their English language, maths and science skills and their commitment to discipline. Yet few communities have been the object of so much simultaneous admiration and disdain as Indian and coloured South Africans.
The enlightenment of Mahatma Gandhi; the freedom campaigns of Monty Naicker, Yusuf Dadoo, Ismail and Fatima Meer, JN Singh, Ismail Kathrada, Mac Maharaj, Reggie September, Sissy Gool, and Dempsey Noel; the unorthodoxy of outstanding sportsmen such as Sewsunker “Papwa” Sewgolum, and the classic elegance of a stoic Hashim Amla or a Basil d’Oliveira, all constituted defining facets of this country’s inheritance.
This has been offset by the grim prospect of the past decade’s course of politics.
It seems children of the generations that struggled for freedom had an exaggerated sense of expectation based on the belief that a free South Africa would realise their potential and make them big in the world.
Tragically, the postapartheid euphoria turned into a bad dream after President Mandela’s successors deflated their national pride.
They didn’t mind the stereotyping and social condescension – the most unflattering being corrupt and exploitative, that carried little credibility. They were confronted with something more devastating – the witch-hunt.
Consequently, for those in search of opportunities, South Africa became a great place to get out of. The skillsdrain that greeted the Republic after the end of the five transition years was a movement of a defeated people.
Under Mandela, South Africa had a secular self-image of being extremely accommodating and inclusive towards all who made it their home.
The ingrained sense of inadequacy and inferiority, coupled with the inability of the political class to address the problems that have undermined the economy, has been a part of the Indian and coloured South African mind. It explains their desire to second-guess why the West, confronted with a similar skills shortage, is advertising jobs here.
It was this sense of not being wanted that explained the migration to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Britain.
The crises at state institutions (especially a comatose Eskom – determined to live, according to Deputy President and chairman of the energy war room, Cyril Ramaphosa, for another two years in ICU), are doing little to negate their assessment of the country.
Too many people have invested too much in the country to allow a sweet dream to turn into a nightmare.
Hence the unending quest for light at the end of the tunnel – or greener pastures abroad. Tragically, attempts to shore up a “good news story” to tell are constantly being derailed by the intrusion of reality.