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Africa News afrol News
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Africa News afrol News
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afrol.com, 11 March - By Tinashe Madava As the migration of skills and labour (human capital) across and outside southern African borders continues amid calls from some quarters to curb it, debate has intensified on whether there really is brain drain or mere intra-regional labour exchange. One of the key features of the globalisation trend, a significant skills exchange has been going on in southern Africa for a long time. In the past, richer countries such as South Africa benefited from this labour migration as workers moved down south to work in the gold fields. This trend has continued even today as both the skilled people and the unskilled go to the famous egoli, the place of gold. However, workers including South Africans, have also been living for other destinations within southern Africa, and across the globe in a complex web of labour exchange. Thus the need to review the region's migration, labour and economic policies has become more urgent to strengthen the regional integration initiative. As a result, governments are putting in place measures to harmonize labour and immigration laws in order to enhance capacity to attract professionals as well as retain and a skilled labour force. However, such calls come amid increased opportunities for people to look around the world while still at home through the vastly improved information technologies of the Internet and mobile phones. "As the opportunities for skilled personnel to move increase with globalization and the shift to a service economy, as the cost of international travel decreases and as the ability to communicate with other parts of the world becomes easier, it is likely that skilled migration will increase over the next few decades - magnifying its importance as a public policy issue," writes David MacDonald and Jonathan Crush in the South Africa-based Africa Insight. The loss of a country's "best and brightest" is not only a loss of personnel but also a general indicator of whether a country is a desirable place to live. According to Winston Meso, another researcher for Africa Insight, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Protocol on the Free Movement of People must be rekindled and implemented in tandem with the SADC Trade Protocol since the later specifically mentions the necessity for a regional framework on the movement of skilled people within the region. MacDonald and Crush argue that compared to the volume of unskilled and forced migrations, the international movement of skilled people is still relatively small, but its social and economic relevance outweighs its numerical significance. The two writers say that political leaders end up declaring emigrants unpatriotic and selfish, while the "media make wild and unsubstantiated statements" about the extent of emigration and its motivations. Upon attaining independence, most SADC countries sent students overseas for more advanced training in an effort to develop their local skills base. These governments were then confronted with the challenge of attracting the graduates back, to make use of their skills in local economies. However, this period also coincided with the streaming back of skilled personnel who had left the countries before independence. According to MacDonald and Crush's research, in the early 1990s, the end of apartheid produced fears within SADC of a "peace dividend" in the form of a renewed brain drain to South Africa from the rest of the region. Initially, these fears seemed justified as skilled workers migrated from the other SADC states around the time that apartheid ended. Some 200 medical doctors left Zimbabwe for Botswana and South Africa in 1992 alone. This raised concern that the region's losses would be South Africa's gain, further exacerbating chronic regional inequalities. A research fellow at the University of Zimbabwe's Institute of Development Studies, Mangosuthu Charles Halimana said recently that Zimbabwe, whose educational standards rate among the best on the African continent, had earned a reputation as "a reliable exporter of cheap skilled manpower." The wave of qualified workers from Zimbabwe and other southern African countries cuts across virtually all professions and stretches to Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the United States. If regional integration in southern Africa is going to take place in any meaningful way, the exchange of highly skilled personnel must be an integral part of it. At one level, this integration is already taking place, albeit at a slower pace than once anticipated. In a sample of 400 skilled foreigners picked in South Africa, a total of 41 percent were from Africa with 18 percent from SADC countries. In Botswana, 77 percent of the sample of skilled foreigners were from African countries, with the majority from SADC. In other words, there is a significant regional exchange of skills taking place and SADC needs to acknowledge it. As southern Africa heads towards a more unified and globalized future, skilled migration is only going to grow in importance and policy makers need to review the region's immigration, labour, and economic policies as well as working on improved political stability to be able to attract and retain skilled labour.
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