Mr. Lovemore Fuyane, a South African resident of Zimbabwean Matebele heritage asserts that the IDENTITY POLITICS is not unique to SA but is a universal human-centric promise and challenge.

A different take on the ZEP issue

On the ZEP issue, the problem South Africa faces today is very much not unlike the one faced by the pre-Brexit UK.

Several years ago when the UK realized that they simply weren’t collecting sufficient taxes as well as having inadvertently created a virtual slave labor market via illegal immigration offered amnesty to those who could prove that they had been in the UK as law-abiding residents for a defined period of time, regardless of whether they came in legally or not and granted them all indefinite stay (permanent residency in South African speak).

They realized that stubbornly not addressing the issue of illegal immigration with a one-time permanent solution had created an unjust society.

And so it actually worked and both the UK and it’s now legal immigrants were regularised and tax revenues, retirement savings, and contributions towards medical insurance all went up. The UK no longer sat with a huge immigrant population most likely living undercover yet still utilizing public infrastructure without paying towards it.

Come Brexit time and the UK, like South Africa is doing today got overrun by the miscreants of society, the dredges of society really, the misguided nationalist ultras into believing that UK nationals’ jobs were being “stolen by foreigners.”

And so the UK did indeed then vote “to Brexit”. Speaking to friends in the UK, the kingdom now has vacancies for 30,000 nurses and an innumerable number of mere truck drivers. So goods aren’t reaching retail outlets on time at great cost to the entire economy.

Brits just don’t do menial jobs like cleaning, caregiving, and that kind of stuff you see and so there’s a massive shortage of all those. So unless having thought through a problem objectively of course no country in the world would ever class these as scarce skills for which immigration ought to be made easier and South Africa is no exception.

There is yet another huge assumption the current South African stance rides on and it is that if we send back 180,000 foreigners guess what, we’ve just created 180,000 jobs magic wand style.

Magic is an illusion made to look “real”. Why anybody would make such an assumption in their heads is puzzling really. Employers most of whom are white, for whatever reason are really desirous of employing some African immigrants.

No credible empirical research has ever been conducted into the causes of this as far as I know but it just is.

None of the people in my circle of associates including middle-class black South Africans have much appetite for employing black South African domestic workers. Again, I don’t know why but it just is.

What they will do instead of they can’t get local domestic workers is turn to white-owned labor brokers to step into the breach and we all know how that’s gone historically. The labor market just doesn’t work on the basis of a perfectly efficient linear supply and demand pattern. It has certain nuances which I am afraid the South African government is missing here as much as they are entitled to run their country as they wish.

Employers after having their foreign workers expelled must still make the decision to hire or not to even hire and who is going to control that and ensure it happens legally? It is entirely the employer’s prerogative and no one else’.

Yes, you may influence who they hire but who to hire comes after the decision to hire itself right? It must follow on the back of an employer for example choosing not to mechanize right?

So the net result is that by the act of terminating 180,000 ZEPs you will falsely raise the hopes of millions of unemployed South African youths. So I am afraid South Africa only risks diminishing the tax collection base as well as potentially impacting interconnected businesses that employ South Africans but are in some way dependent on the ones that employ sizeable numbers of non-South Africans.

Most media to large businesses do not operate in isolation but in networks of interdependencies.

In my view, after twelve years these people are now too entrenched in the South African economy and social fabric to just be let go without disrupting the already shaky economy. And so therein lies a huge sense deficit.

South Africa had to have foreseen this when they issued the ZEPs and nothing has changed to necessitate a change of policy now. We now face a situation where those that heeded the call and got documented via ZEPs are now the laughing stock of those that never did yet hold fraudulent papers.