South Africa

May 2006

  
Immigration law clogs up flow of essential foreign skills, (Business Day, 2006-05-02):-On Friday night Face to Face’s Lindsay Williams looked at government’s 6% gross domestic product growth objective, and asked if the red tape at the home affairs department would effectively prevent the necessary skills and investment from coming to SA. He spoke to Business Day’s international affairs editor Jonathan Katzenellenbogen, Absa’s Chris Hart and Deloitte’s Lino de Ponte. Page five of Friday’s Business Day says: “Foreign companies in SA are increasingly frustrated by the red tape and time it takes to move senior executives and skilled employees into SA.” Jonathan, what is the background to your article? I have had first-hand experience of this kind of thing. When I came to SA in 1988 it took a long time to get a work permit and permanent residence. It does not seem to be getting any better. From what I’m hearing from foreign companies, and immigration advisers it has become a lot worse since the passage last year of the amendment to the Immigration Act. That makes it extremely difficult to bring in top executives who would run the local operations, and very often other very skilled personnel they require urgently. Often they just can’t bring in these people because of the time it takes, and they don’t have time to mess about. Companies are now forced to advertise, which is a major problem — or they can apply for an exemption from advertising, but it takes months and months. Lino, you must have first-hand experience of this in your position as head of immigration advisory services at Deloitte. Are you finding it terribly frustrating? Incredibly. The situation we are facing is that Home Affairs cannot handle the volume of applications they are receiving. Exemptions that should be quite a simple process are taking four or five months to be resolved. So we are sitting in limbo whenever the MD of a major multinational needs to come in, and we are trapped because we are unable to bring the person in. If we do, we would be in breach of legislation. I would say we are now sitting with 800 applications right now that are caught in this situation. You are not talking about plumbers, bricklayers or artisans —which is not to say anything against those categories — but you are talking about the upper echelons of the business world. Yes. There are some positive changes. It’s not all negative. For example, they have released quota categories. If it’s civil engineers or mechanical engineers we are trying to bring in, the process is actually quite simple. With artisans we do an intracompany transfer, and they will be in SA for six months or less. It’s really with top chief financial officers and CEs where we are having problems. What sort of message is this sending to overseas companies trying to bring their executives to SA? A lot of them are questioning why their businesses should be here in the first place. They were told to please invest in SA, please bring in all your billions, please create jobs. Now all of a sudden they find that when they need to fly executives out, they have to apply offshore for permits they have already had for two years. Jonathan, what will be the upshot of this? There is talk about certain head offices based in SA going to neighbouring countries. Botswana and Zambia have fewer restrictions. In SA we have government’s Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for SA (Asgi-SA) where they want 6% gross domestic product growth on a sustained basis, and they are going all-out to attract foreign direct investment. Then there is a bottleneck at a crucial point. I think it’s bad planning and bad administration. Home Affairs say they do admit to capacity constraints, but that’s all they are prepared to admit to. They say information technology will improve matters. Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula should resign, says the Democratic Alliance (DA). What do you think about that? Does it go right up to the minister? No, it’s not that. When home affairs changed the legislation, they were really trying to simplify the process, but they have ended up oversimplifying it. The old legislation was incredibly technical. You could get people in, but you really needed to know your way around the provisions. While Home Affairs simplified the law, they made a couple of mistakes. One is that the definition of “work” is so wide. If I were to fly in for a single business meeting, technically I would need a work permit. For one meeting? Technically speaking, even for one meeting. The definition of “work” is so wide that any non-citizen who is not in the country for vacation purposes is deemed to be working. So from your point of view, and from Deloitte’s, is this situation easily rectifiable? Yes, a letter has been written, and it has been passed around all the chambers of commerce, which proposes four corrections to the legislation. The minister has the power to exempt anyone from any requirement in the regulations. If she gave that exemption, the problem would be solved overnight. You say you have contacted the various chambers of commerce. Is it going to have any effect? I have got a meeting with the minister on 9 May. I am hoping to be able to present this to her and to explain the situation. Home affairs is caught in a bit of a Catch-22. They need to make sure that people in the country are contributing to the economy, and this not at the expense of South Africans, but at the same time they need to let the major corporates bring in the necessary skills. What we will propose is an exemption for companies that are listed in SA and elsewhere. If they were to apply that exemption, home affairs would still have control of the movement of people into the country. 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South African Migration Project (SAMP) - Queen's University - http://www.queensu.ca/samp