Two big economic events landed in SA’s inbox on Wednesday, one good and one bad. And they are related.
First, good news as home affairs minister Leon Schreiber gazetted the first of what we must hope will be sweeping reforms to the SA visa regime. A new remote work visa will mean anyone earning about R650,000 (that’s a modest $37,000) a year or more can come and live here as long as they like. I suspect it will be popular. I have just spent a month in Europe and life here if you have some income is twice as good and a fraction of the price.
Schreiber also took a sledgehammer to our cumbersome general work visa system, introducing a points-based approach that essentially renders the always useless critical skills list redundant and saves you having to fake-advertise a job locally when the experienced person you’ve decided to hire for a particular job happens not to be South African. All the person needs to do is score 100 points on Schreiber’s ridiculously transparent and corruption-resistant new system, and fewer if you’re already on home affairs’ trusted employer list. And he has a waiver for people whose foreign qualifications might need to be evaluated by a local body.
Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a sustained assault on the xenophobic approach to immigration of the ANC. Immigrants are a valuable resource the world over and the same applies here. The easier it is for people to come and earn their money in SA, and spend it here, the better. Schreiber tells me his remote work visa could be “one of the most attractive in the world”, and he is not wrong.
Cleared backlogs
The people targeted by his reforms will not take a single job from a South African. If anything, they’ll create further jobs. I read a typically tight-assed piece the other day in which some analysts were discussing the government of national unity and the contributions of DA ministers such as Schreiber. They concluded that all the newbies were really doing was implementing the policies of the previous ministers — in Schreiber’s case, former home affairs and current health minister, the fabulously ineffective Aaron Motsoaledi.
This may be so, but it is also the point. Schreiber has cleared huge visa and ID backlogs and now gazetted the first visa reforms, inside 100 days of being in office. Motsoaledi may have brought the policies into being, but had no ability to implement them. President Cyril Ramaphosa will be delighted to see DA ministers doing the reforming his ANC colleagues (and he and Motsoaledi are close) found impossible.
Indeed, if progress at a complex department such as home affairs is any guide, by the time the GNU falls apart a lot of the hard reforms Ramaphosa would have wanted done will have been done and none of it would have cost him a political dime.
Schreiber was careful on Wednesday to thank the presidency and its Operation Vulindlela for supporting him, but the good people running Ramaphosa’s parallel government inside Operation Vulindlela will have been horrified at the decision of the Durban high court to interdict the deal between Transnet and the Philippines’ International Container Terminal Services Incorporated (ICTSI), which was intended to allow ICTSI to manage Durban’s big but tottering Container Terminal Pier 2.
Court agreed
Bringing the private sector into the logistics nightmare created by corruption and a succession of weak leaders at Transnet has been a key Ramaphosa reform, and the court decision is a huge setback. It could take years to resolve.
The core issue in court was whether Transnet was right to allow ICTSI to include its equity market capitalisation and evidence of its financial muscularity in the proposal that won over Transnet a year ago. A rival bidder, APM Terminals, part of the Maersk group, complained and the court agreed with it.
The Transnet CEO who made the call was Portia Derby. She was shortly to resign, but it is astonishing that the Ramaphosa administration ever thought she was up to running Transnet in the first place. She left shortly after “awarding” the contract, closely followed by the head of Transnet’s freight rail business, Siza Mzimela, and a few weeks later by its chair at the time of the award, Popo Molefe.
Derby’s replacement, Michelle Phillips, a Transnet lifer who used to run the ports, has shown little stomach for Ramaphosa’s reforms and on more than one occasion one sees signs in media statements and leaks of what might be rebellion against private sector partners from inside Transnet.
But Phillips and her chair, the lovely but I fear fatally gentle Andile Sangqu, will have to stand up now and fight or leave. How do they get the container terminal deal back on track? Government is behind reform and bringing in private capital to relieve Transnet of the many burdens it cannot bear, so there should be no complaint about political support. Why can’t the Transnet management just do it?
The common theme here is that putting the right people in the right jobs is everything. Sure, the courts are a problem for Transnet, but the problems of the CEO and chair lie inside the organisation, not outside. Dr Schreiber over at home affairs would have walked into a politically very hostile environment just a few months ago, but he seems — no doubt by dealing with his people with respect — to have found a way through.
Meanwhile, Maersk is not going to go away on its own, and nor will ICTSI. Is there perhaps a wider deal to be done so we can all move on? Offer all of Transnet’s dreadful Cape Town port, ranked almost last in the world, to Maersk for 30 years in return for allowing the ICTSI Durban deal to go ahead?
The competition would be fun to watch, and the more successful ports we have, the richer all our people will be.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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