South Africa faces exodus: Emigration outpaces refugee crisis - Terence Corrigan - Biznews

Terence Corrigan
“South Africa is far from perfect, but it belongs to those who believe in justice, dignity, and equality. To Afrikaners committed to that vision: your country needs you. To those who long for a past of domination – go if you must.” So said Kamohelo Chauke in his piece last week.

I rather enjoyed reading it. He made some good points (it bears repeating that there’s no genocide here), and some not so good ones. In any event, it’s great that he’s voicing his views in the Daily Friend. What resonated for me was that his sentiments echo those I’ve been hearing since the 1980s, when nervous and well-heeled suburbanites were heading for the exit. The Chicken Run, it was derisively called. Here too, the response was to invoke patriotism – understood in rather different terms at that time – for those remaining and to sniff at those who just weren’t up to the challenge. Africa is, after all, not for sissies. (“Die Chicken Run,” intoned Koos Kombuis in Ver van die ou Kalahari back in 1987, “is fowl play…”) 

Growing up in a small town at that time, I only recall one family making such a move: a professional couple who also ran a farming operation. Choosing to leave a comfortable life in South Africa was fundamentally about their four children, and the opportunities that a new life in Canada would offer them. Their departure also signalled the end of one of my earliest childhood friendships, although as things are wont to happen, my friend connected with me via email out of the blue a few years ago. His parents’ boldness had paid off, and he and all his siblings had done well for themselves. My pal is ridiculously well educated and working as a doctor in Toronto. (His accent remains hung in mid-Atlantic, being neither quite Saffer, nor quite Canuk.)

Over the years, I’ve seen this play out again and again and again. I’ve seen people taking an uninterrupted journey from the university graduation hall to the international departures hall. Gap years and “I’m just going to earn some pounds” became a life trajectory. I’ve seen doctors, teachers, cabinet makers, welders, lawyers, environmental specialists, public representatives and businesspeople go. They’ve been fist-pumping ANC die-hards, café society lefties, suburban liberals, dyed-in-the-wool racial recidivists (one of whom has become puritanically woke, and oh-so-antiracist), and the entirely apolitical. A particularly quixotic species are those in academia who fiercely declaim a decolonial Afrikan worldview, but whose career objective is a berth in a European or American institution. I’ve met them.

I’ve seen people depart for the United States, for Canada, for Chile, for all corners of Europe, for Israel and for the Gulf states, for Australia and New Zealand and for spots in East Asia. I know of some who have made their homes in places like Botswana and Zambia. My own brother lived most of the last two decades of his life in Taiwan, married a Taiwanese girl, and is buried in its soil. 

Common thread

Each of these has his or her own story, but there is a common thread that runs through them all. Indeed, it is a thread that runs through the entire history of the human species. Whether because existing circumstances become untenable, or because something more favourable beckons beyond the horizon, people migrate because they are in search of something better, even if sometimes this involves choosing between the existential and the awful. It is the tie that binds Stone Age hunter-gatherers seeking out herds of game, the seaborne exploration of the Polynesian peoples into the Pacific, the waves of emigration to the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries, the repatriation of the Jewish diaspora to Israel, and, yes, South Africans seeking a new start in Darwin, Dubai or Dublin.

So it is with the planeload admitted to the US as refugees. I’ll refrain from dishing out the condemnation that has been directed at them or presuming to understand their motives. I’ve read bits and pieces about individual stories, and I’m happy to accept that many of them carry some very real trauma. (Such experiences, I imagine, probably speak to the legal bases on which they were admitted to the US.) Whatever it may have been, they felt that the future they would have – and which they could offer their children – would be superior in the US to what they could look forward to in South Africa.

The scorn poured on them – by Chauke, by President Ramaphosa, and by the prevailing media coverage – assumes this is all about racism, cowardice and deficient character. They reject the spirit of transformation, the new South Africa and the zesty challenges that it throws up. By implication, if they were better people, they would stay and contribute to the building of the post-apartheid Nirvana.

That’s a comforting way to view it. The real South Africans, the toughies and the good people, remain. But it’s at best a partial explanation. Emigration has been one of the great indictments on South Africa since the transition. It has been a very real loss to the country in terms of skills now made available to new host countries. The numbers are staggering. A recent piece in Businesstech – referencing data from the UN and Stats SA – found that more than a million South Africans were living abroad. Of these, some 710 000 had departed between 1990 and 2024. That’s a crude measure (probably an understatement), but a revealing one for a country with the sort of skills deficits that South Africa has. Concerningly, the rate of emigration spiked in two periods. The first of these was in the late 1990s, during the post-transition uncertainty, when an average of some 75 people were leaving each day. The second has been in the period between 2020 and 2024, in other words, that of the nominally post-state capture, New Dawn era, when the daily average was only marginally lower, at 74.

Living abroad as refugees

Incidentally, 4 258 South Africans were living abroad as refugees in 2022. That was years prior to the current refugee initiative. It would be enlightening to know why they had sought the protection of another state. I doubt the answers would redound to South Africa’s credit.

This has come at a steep cost in pure economic terms, something only compounded by the catastrophic failings of the education system. More than this, it has signalled a lack of faith in the country’s future.

The condemnatory blowback invariably finds expression not only in questioning the moral calibre of the emigrees, but in their professed grounds for leaving. Often, these narratives are run together. White South Africans are better educated, wealthier, own more land and so on than others. They have it good and have nothing to complain about. (In fact, “justice, dignity and equality” demands that their outsized affluence and influence be curbed and reduced to something approximating their share of the population.) They are only going because of their visceral hatred of black people and a black government.

This argument doesn’t really hold water, at least not in relation to contemporary migration dynamics. Much attention has been paid to the flows of desperate and impoverished refugees in the Mediterranean and on the southern border of the US. But simultaneously, the global economy has opened the floodgates for the world’s entrepreneurial and professional middle classes to seek out new opportunities. It’s not uncommon for a move to a wealthier jurisdiction to mean a step change in life chances that would simply not be possible by remaining at home. It is the relatively affluent that have the means and the incentives to make the move.

These are not the wretched of the earth, but its comparatively privileged, and those whom modern societies depend on.

Most developing countries

This is a challenge for most developing countries. A 2023 poll, for example, found that more than half of Nigerian professionals – invariably those who were younger and in high-demand industries – were seriously contemplating emigration. The Nigerian diaspora, for all the negative stereotypes attending it, has seen thousands of the country’s most talented people depart, as the rosters of hitherto unfamiliar surnames in South African universities attest (despite its multitudinous dysfunctions, Johannesburg can make a favourable comparison to Lagos). In the US, Nigerian immigrants and their descendants are typically highly educated, above-average earners and aspirational for better futures. A success story in other words.

Successful developing countries are able to make a compelling counteroffer: a stable, prosperous life in familiar societal surroundings (biltong, pap, and magwinya will never taste as good in Houston…) and a future that looks better than today. To remain in such a society, even when emigration is a possibility, is in some way to choose to be a part of the national “transformation”, a statement not merely of commitment to a country, but of well-founded expectation that this choice will pay off.

This is really why Chauke’s remark “your country needs you” hits home to me. Your country might need you, but does it really want you? Is it using you to fulfil the purposes for which it needs you? Or, perhaps better expressed, is it doing anything to keep you?

Unfortunately, it’s often not recognised that a constant theme of South African history has been sectarian nationalism, typically parading itself as a benevolence for all. In this sense, too, the African National Congress treads a well-worn South African path. To borrow an insight from RW Johnson, African nationalism is following British imperial jingoism and Afrikaner nationalism in trying to manage a complex society to the exclusion of a constituent part.

Distribution of rewards

A significant element of the governance agenda over the past three decades has been geared at shifting the distribution of rewards among what President Ramaphosa termed (with a very 1970s nomenclature) the country’s “national groups”. There are more than a few South Africans who feel that the demographic bean counting circumscribes their prospects of making a contribution to the vision that Chauke invokes. Whatever they may wish to contribute is hostage to whether they belong to an appropriate “national group” at a given time and for a given position to enable them to do so. The state has certainly chased this vision with an energy unmatched by a regard for the efficacy of governance, while new legislation aims at enforcing such diktats on the private sector too.

South Africa’s tragedy is, sadly, rather more profound than the specific grievances of racial minorities might suggest. It is that South Africa as a whole is struggling credibly to make an offer of a future. To anyone. Of any “national group”. If there are – as in the view of Chauke and the President – people who have left South Africa out of resentment for the post-apartheid dispensation, these are outdone many times over by those who have done so for concerns around a stagnant economy, about collapsing infrastructure, and about their personal safety. It says something when an official delegation to the US counters the idea that farmers face an elevated danger by pointing to the general murder and mayhem afflicting the country. With just a hint of parody, this was a matter of saying that there is no “white genocide”, since in fact, we’re trying to kill everyone. (Though, for some time, remember, it was considered quite racist to suggest that South Africa had a crime problem. How things have evolved!)

Elsewhere, South Africans feel the weight of this pathology lifted from their shoulders. As one Boeremeisie who has made a life running a business in Lusaka commented to me: “Dis veilig hierso! En almal is vriendelik!”

I am reminded of a conversation I had with a Nigerian student in the UK a few years ago. Enormously accomplished even before undertaking his then-current round of studies, he had no interest in returning home. In Nigeria, he said, it was all about connections. Not what you could offer but whom you knew, and how that relationship could be parsed into untoward advantage. I’m afraid I hear echoes of those sentiments in South Africa. Pockets of excellence aside, South Africa has become comfortable with mediocrity, even with failure. Indeed, many of its institutions depend on this. The state has become twisted into something that more closely resembles a patronage machine than a mechanism for service provision or for enabling societal life.

“Rejection of meritocracy”

The National Planning Commission has referred to a “rejection of meritocracy”. Regular readers will recall that I have used this phrase in a number of previous pieces. That is because I regard it as probably the most important piece of commentary on post-apartheid South Africa. It is not just that South Africa is failing, but that it has purposefully rejected the necessary conditions for its success.

Nothing suggests that the emigration flow will slow down, nor that its impacts will decrease. Afrobarometer’s polling shows that one in four South Africans is looking at leaving the country with some degree of earnestness. It continues: “The most likely to consider greener pastures abroad form part of the essential elements of building a thriving society: citizens with post-secondary education, those with the highest economic status, those holding full-time jobs, and youth.”

My childhood friend once told me that over the years in his medical work, he’d seen a number of applications from South African doctors for positions in Canada. Interestingly, the profile had shifted, from the initial Murrays and McDonalds, to the Venters and Van Aswegens, to the Noordiens and Naidoos, and to the Mofokengs and Mkhizes.

Note this well. Emigration is now a phenomenon reflecting the full diversity of the cloud-bedecked Rainbow Nation. Note too that we daily bid farewell to more South Africans than were accepted by the US as part of the controversial refugee initiative. Obsessing about the latter woefully obscures this and the grim realities behind it.

Corrigan is projects and publications manager at the Institute of Race Relations

https://www.biznews.com/rational-perspective/sa-exodus-emigration-outpaces-refugee-crisis-corrigan

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.