Battering the scatterlings of Africa

FOR all its obvious failures and shortcomings, Africa has an unrivalled ability to enchant. It grabs hard and doesn’t let go.

When Out of Africa author

Karen Blixen returned to her native Denmark after 17 years in Kenya, she became deeply depressed. For 20 years she couldn’t bring herself to open the packing cases with her possessions from her farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

Migration, as the research repeatedly and unanimously shows, is a booster jab against economic anaemia. While the ANC government pays lip service to the concept, the reality is different. Every obstacle is seemingly placed before foreigners who seek to contribute to the country’s growth.

There’s a Critical Skills List that is meant to facilitate the speedy entry, for work or permanent residence, of desperately needed skills. Although we should basically welcome anyone who can read, ’rite and reason, the CSL, laboriously compiled in a flatfooted two-year process, is hopeless.

South Africa, theoretically, has put out the bureaucratic welcome mat to chefs, advertising fundis and digital artists but is not interested in medical specialists, nor electrical, mechanical, metallurgical, mining and civil engineers – which were on the previous CSL. Nor are artisanal or technician skills required.

It’s pretty much the same thing with overseas project investment, which President Cyril Ramaphosa is supposedly moving heaven and earth to obtain.

I recently met a French couple who have invested R15million in developing a small farm they bought in 2013. They are also engaged in setting up a pharmaceutical project bringing in around R400m in initial foreign investment, that will export to the EU.

Despite every effort, over nine years they have been unable to get Home Affairs to grant anything better than three-month tourist visas.

That means they are in a perpetual shuttle between South Africa and France – they have to return to their home country for renewal – at enormous cost and inconvenience.

Their persistence baffles business logic. But it’s South Africa that holds their hearts, so they slog away at it. For now.