As despondency over SA’s future sets in among the privileged, a new wave of emigration is under way. As reported in last week’s Financial Mail, FNB’s Estate Agents Barometer shows that the number of home sellers who cite emigration as the reason for placing their property on the market nearly doubled from 7% in the fourth quarter of 2017 to 13.4% in the second quarter of this year. The rise is driven not by the wealthy but by the middle class, who owned properties priced below R1.6m on average.
Emigration or “semi-gration” is also happening in new ways. “Golden visa” residency programmes for Europe, which can be bought for as little as €140,000, are on the rise, and applications for UK ancestral visas and Lithuanian citizenship have increased. The Pam Golding Properties website, which now offers to facilitate a similar investment-residency scheme for the US, says that “having a small array of passport options is a new form of legacy to pass down the generations”.
At the same time, the business elite are “offshoring” their children for their university education as well as offshoring their money. The trek back to Dubai, which ended with a bang in 2008, is back on again. For lots of SA professionals this is a stepping stone into the wider world.
The big question is: does it matter? As it is mostly, but far from exclusively, white South Africans who are taking up these options, the political reaction to emigration is often a knee-jerk response of “let them leave”. Having benefited from generations of apartheid and accumulated plenty of wealth in the process, the feeling is that it is galling that they should leave as things get really tough.
But rising hardship among the poor majority and the fact that 25 years of democracy have not transformed racial patterns of ownership and wealth have fed racial animosity. The volume of anti-white sentiment — especially since the rise of the EFF — has been turned up. As this also resonates in the ranks of the ANC, the party has done little to counter it. It is fast becoming part of the narrative.
The problem, though, is that no matter the anger and resentments that justifiably exist, the answer to the question of whether it matters if people with skills and assets leave is yes. It matters a lot.
Harvard academic Ricardo Hausmann, as an outsider to SA’s problems, has in recent visits here succeeded in dispassionately nailing the problem, urging SA to build on the strengths it acquired during colonial conquest and development, despite their origin. He has been particularly insightful on the questions of emigration and immigration.
The main reason a country is successful today, says Hausmann, is the extent to which technology has diffused in that country. While technology can easily be transferred in the form of tools or written protocols, know-how — an essential element to the diffusion — resides only in brains. As brains learn slowly, technology transfer is difficult. It is quicker to move brains that have knowledge into countries than it is to move knowledge into brains. It is even quicker to hold onto the know-how that you have.
That is why, says Hausmann, successful societies are characteristically open to immigration. Successful countries do not narrowly define who is allowed to live, work and invest; they are broadly inclusive and have what he calls a broad and deep “sense of us”.
A “sense of us” — across race and class divides — is not something SA has ever had. The common purpose that appeared during the Mandela era was fleeting and, not born out by lived experience, never took root. Since then, even though many more South Africans have had the experience of coming together as colleagues, neighbours, parents and families, a shared sense of what it is to be South African is pitifully thin.
Simultaneously, as SA fails to cement a wider sense of South Africanness, it is emphatically closed to immigration. To work here, a foreigner must have a skill that is on the list of “critical skills” compiled by the department of home affairs. To start a business, a foreigner must invest in something that according to the department of trade & industry, “is in the national interest”. To get certified by either is just the beginning; after that there is the onerous processes at the department of home affairs to submit to.
• Paton is writer at large.
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