Immigration and Race in South Africa

[Philip Copeman]

I grew up in South Africa in a racist dictatorship. I have spent most of my adult life trying to rid ourselves of this scourge. Listening to Home Affairs Minister Naledi Pandor and an experience while helping a client this week, confirmed that we still live in a racist dictatorship.

Immigration into South Africa is controlled by the Immigration Act and South African companies have to confirm to legislation, propagated by both the ANC and DA called the Employment Equity Act. These acts effectively categorize employees according to nationality, race and gender and then impose an arbitrary “equity” criteria upon the employers in making employment decisions.

A whole industry has grown around these acts with immigration consultants and “BEE consultants” who for the fee of R 12000 ($1000) a year or 120 times the price of a full multi user TurboCASH Accounting package, will come around and “grade” your company and give you a certificate of compliance.

In setting this up for a client and dealing with one of these consultants we had to deal with the status of two female Zimbabwean employees. The consultant turns to us and with a straight face and says “they are categorized as white men”, meaning that that in terms of this heinous legislation these women are ranked along side the lowest of the racially low .

Under Apartheid we would categorize people with a pencil test. You put a pencil in their hair if it fell out they were white and if it didn't they were black. That seems like a far better system than the one that we now use. We can supply pencils and the testers for a lot less than $ 1000.

What are we doing people?

The Borders in the SADC region we drawn up just over 100 years ago by some British Colonialists over Tea and Cucumber Sandwiches in the Mount Nelson Hotel. Here we are in the 21^st century still trapped in this nonsense. Your heart must be as black as the coal of Witbank if you can take part in a system that legally prejudices a person because the GPS location of where they were born places them on one or other side of the Limpopo river.

As South Africa employers, we pay as much as 40% PAYE to employ a person, 14% on the value added output that they create, 28 % income tax, 12% STC on dividneds and 16% Capital gains if we sell the company. 60% of the revenue collected from this process is used to pay the wages and salaries of a bloated, non-productive civil service that has ballooned from 34 ministers under Mandela to 64 minister under Zuma. There are nine separate provinces and Parliaments all duplicating the national functions. Each of these departments with a entourage of administrators and an expense budget that produces what?  - administration.

As Africa businesses we face up against some of the most vicious global capitalists in the world. In the IT and financial services worlds, attracting skills to our business is a cut throat activity. In a world where creative destruction rules, our human capital is a matter of survival.  It is extremely difficult to retain software developers and financial professionals. Many of these vital components of our businesses are white men. Daily they are offered high paying jobs in major world capitals. Country delegations come to South Africa to recruit them. Tech business are offered relocation incentives to move our businesses. In the face of these pressures we are expected to support legislation that prejudices them.

In the modern world, a job can be moved with the click of a mouse. Our Home Affairs Department works on a paper system, with clerks carry files up and down stairs in Pretoria. Is it really necessary, when we are already parasitically constraining a business with a draconian tax regime, to add the burden of having a Government Clerk, who has never worked a profit making day in their lives, come in and cross question whether a rational business manager needs or doesn't need an employee and in particular, use the criteria that they are Japanese or Zambian, or Shangaan born on the east or west side of the Lebombo mountains.

This racist regime has succeeded in placing us R1 Trillion in debt, led us to one of the highest youth unemployments in the world and made our growth rate the mockery of the African continent. As a member of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, I belong to an organization that is committed to tearing down the artificial borders that separate us in Africa.

Under Apartheid I regularly found myself apologizing to black people for the behavior of the white electorate. Today I would like to apologize for the behavior of the 87% of South Africans that vote for the ANC and DA who propagate this legislation. Under the tyranny of the “brown” majority, the blackness or whiteness of your skin counts against you. To all those people that support this racist rubbish, I simply don't understand who you believe you are. To the 4 Million immigrants that are in South Africa I want you to know that you are not alone. There are people that care about changing this situation. We have done this before under Apartheid. If we speak out, organize and we work together, we can overthrow the politics of this madness.