adminThe Sadc region should enhance labour migration within the region notwithstanding the xenophobic attacks that took place in South Africa recently, a South African business leader has said.Presently, there is no overall regional policy framework to govern migrant labour in Sadc, although a draft policy is being developed since 2013.
Banking Association South Africa (Basa) managing director Cas Coovadia told a regional business conference that ran concurrently with the Sadc Extraordinary Summit in Harare Tuesday, that the region risked losing its skills to other economic blocs if labour migration is not improved.
“We need to enable the movement of people despite what’s been happening in South Africa recently. We need to leverage off the skills we have and the skills we’re going to build in the region. If we in the region don’t leverage those skills, they will simply go somewhere else. It’s a global world today,” said Coovadia.
“We’ve got to harness the skills in the region and we’ve got to share those skills, and we’ve to enable people to feel comfortable to move across the region.”
Analysts have said the xenophobic attacks on African foreigners that took place in South Africa over the last couple of weeks could negatively impact trade and economic dynamics within the Sadc region, and also affect the drive towards regional integration.Xenophobia could be a topical issue at the ongoing Sadc Extraordinary Summit here in Harare.
Despite the lack of an overarching policy on labour migration, there are a number of existing migration or labour migration policies at national, bilateral or multilateral level within the region. And in the region such agreements are dominated by South Africa, which is the major migrant receiving country in the Sadc region.
Among these agreements are Memorandums of Understanding agreements (MoUs) with Zimbabwe, Cuba and Tunisia to meet labour demands in critical sectors or for certain skills.
But these have clearly not helped whenever the xenophobia attacks – which experts say cannot be divorced from the economic life of the masses – have arisen.
Coovadia said a number of business organisations in South Africa are currently looking at understanding and eventually dealing with the economic causes of xenophobia.
“I’ve been a party to a couple of discussions held recently by five of the major business organisations in the country, one of them, the one I head , the Banking Association of South Africa, and then the Chamber of Mines and the Business Unity of South Africa, Black
Business Council and Black Leadership South Africa, together with Proudly South Africa.
“We’ve come together and we will in the next week or so publicly announce the launch of a medium-to-long term campaign to begin to look at some of the underlying issues that cause xenophobia and begin to address those as business,” he said. – BH24.
Bongani Ndlovu