Kat and Daniel: September 2008

The Economist
SOUTH AFRICA
Sep 25th 2008 


Violent crime and political turmoil are adding to South Africa's brain
drain

FIRST he thought it was a mouse, then a rat--and then the rat shot him
in the face. That is how Andre Brink, one of South Africa's most famous
novelists, described the recent killing of his nephew Adri, at home at
3am in the morning. The young man was left to die on the floor, in
front of his wife and daughter, while his killers ransacked the house.

Such murders are common in South Africa. According to Mr Brink's
account, published later in the SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 16 armed attacks
had already taken place in a single month within a kilometre of the
young couple's plot north of Pretoria, South Africa's capital. Soon
afterwards--this is more unusual--the police arrested a gang of six.
They recovered a laptop and two mobile phones. That was the haul for
which Adri paid with his life.

A decade-and-a-half after the end of apartheid, violent crime is
pushing more and more whites out of South Africa. Exactly how many are
leaving is impossible to say. Few admit that they are quitting for
good, and the government does not collect the necessary statistics. But
large white South African diasporas, both English- and
Afrikaans-speaking, have sprouted in Britain, Australia, New Zealand
and many cities of North America.

The South African Institute of Race Relations, a think-tank, guesses
that 800,000 or more whites have emigrated since 1995, out of the
4m-plus who were there when apartheid formally ended the year before.
Robert Crawford, a research fellow at King's College in London, reckons
that around 550,000 South Africans live in Britain alone. Not all of
South Africa's emigres are white: skilled blacks from South Africa can
be found in jobs and places as various as banking in New York and
nursing in the Persian Gulf. But most are white--and thanks to the
legacy of apartheid the remaining whites, though only about 9% of the
population, are still South Africa's richest and best-trained people.

Talk about "white flight" does not go down well. Officials are quick to
claim that there is nothing white about it. A recent survey by
FutureFact, a polling organisation, found that the desire to emigrate
is pretty even across races: last year, 42% of Coloured (mixed-race)
South Africans, 38% of blacks and 30% of those of Indian descent were
thinking of leaving, compared with 41% of whites. This is a big leap
from 2000, when the numbers were 12%, 18%, 26% and 22% respectively.
But it is the whites, by and large, who have the money, skills,
contacts and sometimes passports they need to start a life outside--and
who leave the bigger skills and tax gap behind.

Another line loyalists take is that South Africa is no different from
elsewhere: in a global economy, skills are portable. "One benefit of
our new democracy is that we are well integrated in the community of
nations, so now more opportunities are accessible to our people,"
Kgalema Motlanthe, now South Africa's president, told THE ECONOMIST.
And to some extent it is true that the doctors, dentists, nurses,
accountants and engineers who leave are being pulled by bigger
salaries, not pushed by despair. But this is not the whole story. Nick
Holland, chief executive of Gold Fields, a mining company, says that in
his firm it is far commoner for skilled whites to leave than their
black and Indian counterparts. "We mustn't stick our heads in the
sand," he says. "White flight is a reality."

Another claim is that a lot of leavers return. Martine Schaffer, a
Durbanite who returned to South Africa herself in 2003 after 14 years
in London, now runs the "Homecoming Revolution", an outfit created with
help from the First National Bank to tempt lost sheep back to the fold.
And, yes, a significant number of emigres do come home, seduced by
memories of the easeful poolside life under the jacaranda trees,
excited by work opportunities or keen--perhaps after having children
themselves--to reunite with parents who stayed behind.

In some cases, idealism remains a draw. Whites who left in previous
decades because they were repelled by apartheid, or who expected
apartheid to end in a bloodbath, can find much to admire. Whites build
tall walls around their houses and pay guards to patrol their
neighbourhoods; they consider some downtown areas too dangerous to
visit. But on university campuses and in the bright suburban shopping
malls it is still thrilling to see blacks and whites mingling in a
relaxed way that was unimaginable under apartheid.

REASONS NOT TO PANIC?
So South Africa certainly has its white boosters. Michael Katz,
chairman of Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs, a law firm in Johannesburg,
hands over a book with the title "Don't Panic!", a collection of
heartwarming reflections by disparate South Africans on why there is,
even now, no better place than home. Mr Katz ticks off the pluses as he
sees them: minimal racial tension (a third of his own firm's 350
professionals are black); a model constitution that entrenches the
separation of powers and is "revered" by the people; a free press and
free judiciary; a healthy Parliament; a vibrant civil society; good
infrastructure and a banking system untouched by the global credit
crunch. The "one major negative" Mr Katz concedes is violent crime. If
only this could be brought under control, he says, the leavers would
return.

But would they? Violent crime is undoubtedly the biggest single driver
of emigration, the one factor cited by all races and across all
professions when people are asked why they want to go. Police figures
put the murder rate in 2007-08 at more than 38 per 100,000 and rape at
more than 75 per 100,000. This marks a big fall over the past several
years, but is still astronomical by international standards (the murder
rate was 5.6 per 100,000 in the United States last year). It has
reached the point where most people say they have either been victims
of violent crime themselves or know friends or relatives who have been
victims. Typically, it is a break-in, carjacking, robbery or murder
close to home that clinches a family's long mulled-over decision to
leave.

All the same, crime is far from being the only cause of white
disenchantment. Some say that 2008 brought a "perfect storm". A
sequence of political and economic blows this year have buffeted
people's hope. Added together they provide reason to doubt whether the
virtues ticked off by the exuberant Mr Katz--a model constitution,
separation of powers, good infrastructure and so on--are quite so
solid.

Good infrastructure? At the beginning of the year South Africa's lights
started to go out, plunging the thrumming shopping malls and luxury
homes into darkness and stopping work in the gold and diamond mines.
This entirely avoidable calamity was caused by a distracting debate
about the role of the private sector in electricity supply. Eskom, the
state-owned utility in which many experienced white managers had been
too quickly pushed aside, is now investing again in new plant under a
new chairman, Bobby Godsell, a veteran mining executive. But for the
time being power will remain in short supply and rationing and
blackouts will continue.

As for that model constitution and the separation of powers, Desmond
Tutu, the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, was moved this week
to describe the sordid battle between Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki, the
party, government, prosecuting authority and courts as suggestive of a
"banana republic". As well as being appalled by events at home this
past year, whites have watched Robert Mugabe's pauperisation of
neighbouring Zimbabwe and wonder whether South Africa will be next to
descend into the same spiral.

Besides, fear of crime cannot be separated from the other factors that
make South Africans consider emigration. People who do not feel safe in
their homes lose their faith in government. John Perlman, who worked
for the SABC, the state broadcaster, before resigning in a quarrel over
political interference, does not believe that most people leave because
they are afraid. "I think they leave when they lose heart," he says.
One white entrepreneur about to leave for New York says that it was not
being held up twice at gunpoint that upset him most: it was the lack of
interest the police showed afterwards. Tony Leon, the former leader of
the opposition Democratic Alliance, claims that policing has been
devastated by cronyism and that the entire criminal-justice system is
dysfunctional. The head of the police, Jackie Selebi, is on leave
pending a corruption investigation.

How much does the outward flow of whites matter? South Africa can ill
afford the loss of its best-trained people. Iraj Abedian, an economist
and chief executive of Pan-African Capital Holdings, says a pitiful
shortage of skills is one of the main constraints on economic growth.
He concedes that the ANC has pushed hard to give every eligible child a
place in school, but argues that a "politically correct" focus on
expanding access has come at the expense of quality. With virtually no
state schools providing adequate teaching in science or maths, he says,
the country has added to its vast problem of unemployment (every other
18-24-year-old is out of work) a no less vast problem of
unemployability.

THE GAP THEY LEAVE BEHIND
On Mr Abedian's reckoning, about half a million posts are vacant in
government service alone because too few South Africans have the skills
these jobs demand. Not a single department, he says, has its full
complement of professionals. Local municipalities and public hospitals
are also desperately short of trained people. Dentists are "as scarce
as chicken's teeth" and young doctors demoralised by the low standards
of hospital administration. Last May Azar Jammine, an independent
economist, told a Johannesburg conference on the growing skills
shortage that more than 25,000 teachers were leaving the profession
every year and only 7,000 entering.

A blinkered immigration policy makes things worse. Nobody has a clue
how many millions of unskilled Africans cross into South Africa
illegally. But skilled job applicants who try to come in legally are
obstructed by a barricade of regulations. Mr Abedian says that the ANC
used to think that relying on foreigners would discourage local
institutions from training their own people. Now at least the
government earmarks sectors where skills are in short supply and for
which immigration procedures are supposed to be eased. In April,
however, an internal report by the Department of Home Affairs showed
that fewer than 1,200 foreigners had obtained permits under this
scheme, from a list of more than 35,000 critical jobs.

In fairness, South Africa has been through far worse times before.
Whites streamed out during the township riots of the 1980s. It is far
from clear how much of the present dinner-table talk about leaving ends
with a family packing its bags. Alan Seccombe, a tax expert at PWC in
Johannesburg, says that many affluent whites have moved money offshore
and prepared their escape routes, but that his firm's emigration
practice is doing less business today than it did in 1995.

Perspective is necessary in politics, too. Raenette Taljaard,
previously an opposition member of Parliament and now director of the
Helen Suzman Foundation, a think-tank, says that events this past year
have raised profound concerns about the rule of law and the durability
of the constitution. But Allister Sparks, the author of several
histories of South Africa (and a former writer for THE ECONOMIST),
maintains that the ANC has done as well as anyone had a right to expect
after apartheid's destructive legacy. Some whites even express
enthusiasm about the advent of Mr Zuma. How many other African
liberation movements, they ask, have been democratic enough to vote out
an underperforming leader, as the ANC has Mr Mbeki?

For the average white person, South Africa continues to offer a quality
of life hard to find elsewhere. And there are other compensations. Mr
Brink says in the article on the murder of his nephew that people who
ask when he will be emigrating are perplexed to hear that he intends to
stay. There is, he says, an "urgency and immediacy" about life in South
Africa that lends it a sense of involvement and relevance he cannot
imagine finding elsewhere.

All the same, he is staying on bereft of some former illusions.

The famous novelist will stay. Many other whites are making plans to
leave, and will be taking their precious skills with them.