Duck! It’s a blank from our intellectual policy arsenal

I’m an optimist by nature but there are moments when you just want to give up. You may not know this but if you’re a foreigner and you want to come and live in SA you have to have a “critical skill”. There’s a list and if the thing you’re really good and experienced at isn’t on the list you can’t come here. The last list was drawn up in 2014. Since then, and particularly in the past two years, skills have been draining out of SA faster than the eye can see. Doctors, engineers, teachers are all heading off. One of our big banks reckons that a third of children leaving private schools are doing so because of emigration, and a third of that third are black. Now a draft of a new critical skills list is being circulated and, guess what? It is much shorter than the last one.

Yes! We apparently need fewer critical skills now than we did five years ago, according to home affairs. I knew governments were stupid, but this is a whole new level.

The critical skills list is curated by home affairs but is drawn up in consultation with the department of labour and the department of higher education & training (DHET). It’s hard to imagine two departments less in touch with the economic crisis we face. OK, women and children and sport maybe.

It is really labour that rules. For instance, at the top of the list submitted by the DHET was “business managers”, people capable of running complex organisations. They don’t appear on the final draft list at all. Labour will have counted all those useful business graduates coming out of Walter Sisulu University in Mthatha and decided we already have enough.

It’s not just business managers. While our dotty new “communications” minister witters on about us climbing onto the fourth industrial revolution, the new draft critical skills list cuts back on the number of IT skills we require from outside.

Foreign language skills are now “critical” only if you’re coming to work in a call centre. If a company in Polokwane builds a business with a partner in Bangkok, they can’t import a Thai speaker to help manage the partnership. Almost all agricultural skills have been taken off the draft list.

It is all beyond lunacy and it reeks of a deep mistrust of foreigners. An official xenophobia. Fewer than 500 foreigners became South African citizens last year, a scandalously low number and driven by officials at home affairs.

Ironically, both Cyril Ramaphosa and Tito Mboweni have sat and listened to Ricardo Hausmann in SA in the past few months.

He runs the Center for International Development at Harvard University. His experience, and the experience gathered by thousands of hours of study and research at the CID, is crystal clear — the greater variety of skills you have in an economy the stronger and more resilient and more labourabsorbent it will be.

But there’s a trick. Skill is not talent. Bouncing a soccer ball on one foot for an hour isn’t skill. Skills can only be taught, or transferred, from one human being to another. You can’t transfer skills in a book or a YouTube video. Skills are why we have medical schools. And when you combine skills with experience you have a potent force. Graduates by and large have no skills. They need to learn them directly from older hands.

Old hands which we’re not only busy losing but, according to the critical skills draft list, actively trying to not replace. As SA’s top immigration lawyer, Stefanie de Saude Darbandi, puts it: “Who is the government consulting?”

We know the answer. It isn’t employers. Other than the department of labour, that vital cog in our intellectual policy arsenal, the government isn’t consulting anyone. On arguably the most easy economic fix imaginable.

As I write this I realise I don’t know who the minister of labour is. Does it matter? OK, it’s Mildred Oliphant. I looked. Salary R2.2m a year and holder of certificates in macroeconomics and project management.

I don’t mean to belittle her but if she didn’t appreciate her role in the economy before, I hope this article helps. Her department is actively depleting our skills base.

The DA manifesto makes much more sense on immigration and industry. Turn the whole country into a special economic zone, party leader Mmusi Maimane says. He’s right. Give people tax breaks to create jobs from Pretoria to Pofadder. What are we waiting for? Oh yes, the final “critical skills list”, our ultimate barrier against critical skills sneaking into the country. It’s almost worth a commission of inquiry.