Pretoria - With South Africa still struggling to bridge the gap of core critical skills needed to boost the economy, the Department of Home Affairs is convinced that waiting for decades for the country to catch up will rob South African children.
Speaking at the department’s fourth and final international migration policy roundtable discussions, minister Malusi Gigaba said it was important for South Africa to manage international migration properly to better harness the desperately needed skills.
The discussions were held at the CSIR convention centre on Tuesday under the theme: “Strengthening national capacity to manage international migration in South Africa”.
Gigaba said: “If you look at our health science students, dentists, pharmacists and doctors; they get attracted to England and other European countries. We need to be able to have a balanced approach as we cannot say to them they can’t leave the country as it’s their right and they will do so. But for each skill that we lose to another country, it creates a gap here. This cannot be filled through our own wishes, so we need to go out and recruit skills elsewhere and ensure we plug the gap.
“We know we don’t have enough maths and science teachers, so what do we do? What do we say to our children? That it’s okay, they don’t have to learn maths and science because we don’t have teachers and that one day, when we do have enough teachers 20 years down the line, then it will be their turn? We can’t do that,” said Gigaba.
Even though South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) spokeswoman Nomusa Cembi agreed that there was a shortfall that needed to be addressed, she also stressed the need to prioritise training South African teachers in the process.
Cembi said numerous schools in South Africa had already been making use of foreign nationals but that the new policy should go further in regulating those recruited skills.
Some of the concerns raised by various stakeholders present included the need to address the financial implications that will come with the policy, the need for legislation to be put in place to serve as a deterrent to xenophobic attacks, and public awareness to involve foreigners in social cohesion.
Home Affairs chief operating officer Thulani Mavuso urged stakeholders to consider abuses of current legislation and how to prevent that. “I am disappointed that no one has yet dealt with abuses of refugee legislation by means of falsified information which means they are in the country under false pretences. This also means it becomes even more difficult to integrate immigrants into communities as they are viewed as illegal.”
Gigaba also remarked that recent xenophobic attacks experienced needed to be dealt with as they hampered progress made on achieving social cohesion.
“Outbreaks of xenophobic attacks are being caused by largely irresponsible leaders who utter irresponsible statements and generate that feeling of resentment and end up creating a sense that immigrants are a problem. This is even though these immigrants being attacked now have lived in those very communities for decades before without problems. Second is the criminal element. We have had these shops all along and suddenly you attack them for no good reason.”
Gigaba cautioned South Africans to desist from associating all immigrants with crime. “If South Africa has a problem of crime then we need to say so. We must say to the police how are you dealing with crime? If we improve relations with our neighbouring countries to be able to share information such as fingerprints in cases where there is a crime scene and the fingerprints here don’t match any South African, we must be able to check elsewhere.”
Pretoria News