SA musos are making waves
GOOD news for local musicians is that South Africa came in at number 12 on the Global Influential Music Index released this week.
The index, which combines data on digital streaming, artist recognition, musical infrastructure and more, revealed the 30 most musically influential countries in the world.
South Africa, the only African country to make the list, also has the second highest percentage of the population working in the arts and entertainment industries at 2.9%, behind Latvia at 3% and ahead of the UK at 2.7%
In the overall rankings, the top country was the US, followed by the UK, France, Germany, Canada,
Japan, Italy, Sweden, Australia and Ireland. Spain was number 11.
The country whose artists are most streamed around the world was the US, followed by the UK, Canada, South Korea, France, Germany, Puerto Rico, Australia, Spain and Sweden, while
Ed Sheeran is the most played music act on streaming services globally, followed by Billie Eilish and Post Malone.
Russia produces the most classical music, while the US produces the most rock, pop and electronic music.
However, Brazil has the highest World Music uniqueness score, followed by Colombia and Ireland. South Africa ranked seventh on the World Music uniqueness table.
The study was launched by medimops, Europe’s largest online marketplace for second-hand CDs and records, to answer the age-old question as to which countries exert the most musical influence worldwide.
The company looked to modern music streaming services to determine the extent of each country’s musical output and reach, combining “play” and “view” data with other measures of artist recognition and support systems.
The resulting index offers the most comprehensive data set about musical influence.
LAST week, the government issued its Critical Skills List. This is the basis on which South Africa will condescend to allow the world’s brightest, most skilled and most talented people, to seek a new life on our shores.
The list, delivered by the Department of Home Affairs (DHA), after two painful years of intellectual constipation, is a sad waste of time.
The last thing in the world that this government wants is clever, capable people. Especially not foreigners, who might show us up.
Highly competent foreigners are not, as elsewhere in the world, embraced for fuelling economic growth. Instead, they’re seen by South Africans as an existential threat to a workforce that is, on the whole, steadily becoming less educated and less skilled.
Imported merit is also a political threat. Job appointments must fit into ever-tightening demographic strait-jackets and career advancement is often the result of tokenism and connections in the ruling party.
Not only is the Skills List already long out of date but it was compiled by exactly the type of people who cause one to appreciate the need to import talent. Remarkably, for a document produced under the ministerial oversight of Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, himself a medical doctor and former minister of health, it will permit the immigration of general practitioners but not medical specialists, of which there is a crippling shortage.
Ann Bernstein, head of the Centre for Development Enterprise, says she doesn’t understand why a country with a massive skills shortage wastes money and time trying to work out what highly specific skills to let in. “The modern economy does not work the way the compilers of the skills list assume it does.”
South Africa’s problem is not only the existing knowledge deficit but a growing future one.
One of the buzz phrases of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration is the Fourth
Industrial Revolution. Or 4IR as it snazzily abbreviates to.
Just in case, like me, you’ve been snoozing at the back of the class, the first industrial revolution was the harnessing of steam in the mid-18th century to mechanise production.
The second was using electricity in the mid-19th century for mass production; 3IR was the 20th-century move to automated production through digital technologies; and 4IR is “a fusion of technologies to blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres”.
In a South African context, 4IR is the critical key to Ramaphosa’s dreams of smart cities and bullet trains. That is, if only the unions would evolve beyond 1IR and Eskom could power 2IR, and the communication ministry releases the broadband necessary to sustain 3IR.
In 2018, in Ramaphosa’s first SONA, he decreed a Digital Industrial Revolution Commission. Now called the Presidential Commission on 4IR, its report was gazetted last year.
Unsurprisingly, the Commission saw South Africa’s 4IR as best being driven by the state. Also unsurprising is the report’s failure to address the lack of highly-skilled workers to sustain a knowledge economy.
According to the government’s White Paper on migration, about 120 000 people with professional qualifications emigrated between 1989 and 2003, with the number growing by 9% a year. Yet DHA grants only about 2 000 “exceptional skills” visas a year.
The developed nations have an insatiable appetite for knowledge workers. One of the sources for these is encouraging students from all around the world into their tertiary institutions, then trying to get the top ones to stay, with the lure of post-graduate bursaries and work visas.
South Africa has a similar influx of bright students from elsewhere in Africa, but despite its talk of a need for “a legal route for (African) economic migrants”, the reality is that it does everything it can to get rid of them the moment they graduate.
“At the end of the day,” says a higher education specialist who chose not be named, “the South African government is only interested in jobs for locals. It fails to understand that these African graduates – many of them with science and technology degrees – are like most economic migrants, job makers, not job takers.”
This is a shortened version of the Jaundiced Eye column that appears weekly on Politicsweb. Follow WSM on Twitter @TheJaundicedEye