The department of Home Affairs has been tasked with facilitating the entry of 50 000 critically skilled professionals including civil, chemical, electrical and mechanical engineers in the next three years, Deputy Minister Fatima Chohan said.
She said Home Affairs would prioritise the sourcing of scarce skills from abroad as a critical part of its management of immigration as concern mounts over the exodus of such skills to other african countries with more lucrative offers.
The Department of Public Works also said last year that it had a database of at least 9 000 unemployed engineers and artisans.
Even though South Africa suffers a severe shortage of engineers, accountants, scientists and doctors, the Adcorp Employment Index this month showed that were about 600 000 unemployed graduates in the country.
Although most did not possess critical or scarce skills, the Engineering Council of South Africa’s 2010/11 annual report showed that there were 10 751 professionals registered as candidates.
Of that, 2301 had been registered in this candidate category for over six years. The majority were candidate engineers at 5652 candidates and 1577 registered over six years.
Only 234 candidates moved to the professional engineer category in the period.
But not all unemployed engineering graduates are registered with ECSA.
South Africa is at risk of losing scarce skills to other African countries as other countries in the continent are more lenient in offering opportunities for new graduates as they suffer from a low numbers of adults with tertiary education qualifications, recruitment group Landelahni said.
According to the group Chief Executive, Sandra Burmeister South Africa remains a favoured hunting ground for skills and with the massive exodus of African professionals to countries overseas, local graduates could provide the capacity needed as investment to the continent grow.
The group said other African countries are becoming more attractive than South Africa in terms of their regulatory environment and massive foreign direct investment projects in energy, mining, transport, telecommunications and water supply continue to flourish in them.
“South Africa will need to produce significantly more skilled resources as growing numbers begin working cross-border.
“The challenge (is) how can we find and retain talent in South Africa and Africa? The African economy cannot create sustainable economic development, if it has to continually import – and pay a premium for – technical ability from the US, Europe 0nd Asia,” said Burmeister.
Ernst & Young forecasted that new African fixed direct investment (FDI) projects would reach US$150-billion by 2015, creating 350 000 new jobs per annum. Apart from South Africa, other countries which are poised for most FDI opportunities include Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Angola.
Landelahni said more African engineers worked in the USA than in the whole of Africa.
The situation is aggravated by the barriers of entry into the workforce among new graduates in countries like South Africa.
Loane Sharp, a labour market analyst at Adcorp, the employment-services company said though the shortage of some skills in the country was a result of insufficient production of graduates and tight immigration laws, the reason why there was a number of unemployed professionals with scarce skills was because the affirmative action limited opportunities for white professionals.
He said white graduates and professionals were six times more likely than their black counterparts to become self-employed.
But he said the country was not at much risk of losing these professionals to European countries or America since the global financial crisis persist.
“More South Africans are returning from abroad and if you look at those going to other African countries, mostly they are with the South African companies expanding to Africa. Such companies are by far the reason why there are lots of short term employment contracts taken in Africa and nothing permanent,” said Sharp. - Londiwe Buthelezi