Extract The cabinet’s OK. Sort of. Obviously President Cyril Ramaphosa could have done better, but ANC leaders who don’t meticulously consult and compromise never get to the end of their races. Witness Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. Given the pool he had to choose from, though, I’d take Pravin Gordhan, Thoko Didiza, Ebrahim Patel, Jackson Mthembu, Tito Mboweni, Patricia de Lille, Zweli Mkhize, Ronald Lamola, Barbara Creecy and even Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma any day. The latter works ferociously hard, and watch Lamola, as justice minister, breathe some oxygen into the fire already lit at the National Prosecuting Authority.
Cape Town always seemed well run when De Lille was mayor, so we can presume she knows how to start and finish a project, or at least knows people who know.
But for the life of me I cannot understand why Ramaphosa named former health minister Aaron Motsoaledi as his new minister of home affairs. It’s not that Motsoaledi isn’t a nice guy. Like the rest of us, ANC politicians are all pleasant until their jobs are threatened. It is just that he is wholly unsuited to what is arguably the most important economic policy job in the government.
His deputy, Njabulo Nzuza, also new, has been secretary-general of the ANC Youth League. He has little history to tell us he might appreciate what a dynamic home affairs department could achieve for poor and jobless citizens.
Motsoaledi is close to Ramaphosa. The job is a reward for loyalty and hard political work rather than success at health, where he largely failed. But that is in the past. What the minister and the entire cabinet need to know is one simple thing, which I watched De Lille say on television on Friday: “Government cannot create jobs. All it can do is create the conditions for the private sector to create jobs.”
Quite something when you consider she is now minister of public works and infrastructure. Cabinet meetings will be a lot brighter for her presence.
But here’s the thing. Even when you’ve got the right conditions in place for job creation, the only way we can do this en masse is by liberalising our absurdly xenophobic immigration regime and finding the wisdom and courage to encourage skilled foreigners to come and live and work here.
Skills create jobs, not the other way around. The new government can try until the cows come home to grow jobs without importing skills and it will continue to fail. Motsoaledi can take a first step towards some sanity on immigration by halting the progress, or withdrawing it if it is complete, of the so-called critical skills list under which companies are able to import foreign workers through an accommodating visa regime.
The list is updated every five years. In 2019, the list of scarce skills, curated by home affairs but actually controlled by the department of labour, has shrunk. We need, the fools who run labour believe, fewer skilled immigrants.
Motsoaledi needs to stop that. The UK, suffering an outflow of skills because of Brexit while we suffer the same because of general pessimism, is about to increase the number of skills that will get you a quick visa to live and work there.
Ramaphosa hoped to send a signal of sorts by renaming the department of labour the department of employment & labour, and then rather spoilt it all by appointing Thulas Nxesi as its minister. Nxesi is a political nod to the Eastern Cape but he will do absolutely nothing for the department. He will certainly not see the need to encourage immigration of skilled people.
Obviously, most skilled immigrants to SA, in an open regime, would be white. That’s a problem for the ANC. Even though they would speak better Hungarian or Portuguese than English, we would allow our racial tics to trump common sense and growth. How about we allow skills in provided such people can show after three years that they have employed, I don’t know, four South Africans per immigrant?
Even simple arithmetic, though, might be too much for home affairs. I wrote here recently about a brilliant Italian restaurateur near Cape Town. He employs in his restaurant and ice-cream business about 10 black South Africans. But home affairs will not renew his son’s work visa, treating his application for renewal as a new application instead. That would have to be done from Italy, of course. And with luck he could return in five years.
Not going to happen. The family have decided to leave rather than live where they are not welcome. Fix that, minister.
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