Full marks to home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi for admitting he was wrong to allow the new work visa regulations to be gazetted before the public comment process closed. Even fuller marks for promising to fix the problem without delay.
It is not often, if ever, that we see cabinet ministers apologising when mistakes are made. It’ is even less often that they move quickly to reverse the mistake.
“I must listen when people raise concerns,” Motsoaledi said of the concerns raised at Nedlac about his department jumping the gun on the regulations. It is the kind of accountability, and ability to walk back from misjudgements, that we would love to see from the government, which would be the better for it.
We will of course hold Motsoaledi to his word. He has promised to withdraw the regulations and to re-gazette a revised version next week. He also needs to gazette details of the points system on which general work visas for foreigners will be based in terms of the new regulations.
We trust he will now press ahead without delay. SA’s skills shortage has been identified as a key constraint on economic growth and investment. And the evidence is that far from making unemployment worse, adding more skilled workers to the economic mix creates more jobs.
Nor is work visa reform just about addressing shortages. If SA wants to attract foreign investment and position itself as a hub for Africa, it needs to make it easy for multinationals to bring in the executives and experts they need — likewise if it wants to make SA a more attractive environment for start-ups and remote work. All of that would in turn enrich SA’s labour pool and its economy.
The process of obtaining skilled work visas has been something of a bureaucratic nightmare in recent years, with the department rejecting more applications than it grants and taking forever to do so.
The presidency has made it a priority to reform SA’s skilled visa system and a 2022 review led by former home affairs director-general Mavuso Msimang made recommendations to change processes and policies. Now at last there is progress on policy change. The department last year started piloting a new trusted employer scheme for large corporate employers. Now it has gazetted the new regulations introducing the new points system and new remote work visas, and streamlining other archaic rules.
That is a hugely welcome development for SA. Welcome too is that the points system will mean the department of labour is no longer involved in general work visas, a change which should remove some of the bureaucratic delay and obstruction.
It is unfortunate that the department messed up the regulatory process by jumping the gun on public comment. And there are some odd lines in the regulations that have caused concern among business people. But errors can be fixed. The minister’s public commitment to do so is a good sign.
Now the department must follow up with bold measures to make its own processes more effective and more efficient. The cumbersome bureaucracy alone is a deterrent to skills and investment.
Motsoaledi also needs to look at the confusing host of different visa types that the department now administers. There too there is scope to streamline.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.