Big job ahead
In 1980 one of my sons was studying in the United States.
I well remember having to get Reserve Bank permission to remit funds to him.
We were getting an exchange rate then for every one rand of just over $1.30.
That means that the rand in 1980 was worth more than 30% of the mighty US dollar.
A week or so ago a leading Swiss study on competitiveness among 55 countries places South Africa 53rd.
Switzerland, as we all know, is the home base of the most reliable financial and investment analysts in the world.
Recently Fitch, a globally respected credit grading agency, adjusted our national credit rating downwards in line with trends in major Western economies.
Nothing to get too despondent about as our fiscal and monetary policies still seem to be on track.
Taking a broader perspective however, statistics tell us that emigration of skilled managers and professionals is responsible for about 18% of residential property sales.
Emigration of all race groups is up, most of those leaving citing crime and lack of opportunity for skilled minorities.
A strategic target group for national development however, trained black women, like nurses and teachers, are flocking to other countries where they earn up to six times more and mentioning, by the way that they get more respect in the UK, Canada, the USA and the Moslem nations than here in KZN, especially from males.
Cash crisis
Senior executives and or professionals earning say R500 000/year, paying taxes to the state, employing domestics and eating out in pricey restaurants, precipitate a real cash crisis when they emigrate - and leave another fraying gap in the shredding social fabric of our national economy.
While these émigrés leave hard-to-fill chasms in sensitive areas, immigrants pour in from states to the north of us, fuelling hysterical xenophobia, leaving scores butchered.
The truth is that South Africa is far worse off at the end of President Mbeki's rule that it was when he took over from Nelson Mandela.
Once the national housekeeping - like maintaining sanitary and transport systems and our formerly world-famous health care services, keeping the lights on, providing decent protection for citizens, repairing potholes, preventing the economically devastating and crippling wholesale theft of conductive metals, education for the future generations - goes into a decline, the faster and more inevitable is the subsequent collapse.
I like to call this Mugabe's Law.
For many cogent reasons, Team Mbeki was ousted at Polokwane.
The irrational international profile in supporting outcast dictatorships like Burma and Zimbabwe in UN votes, hasn't endeared us to the West.
Our Minister of Health surrounds herself with crackpots and mystics who advocate garlic and beetroot diets to cure these conditions.
The elevation of Jacob Zuma brings some hope for the future, but has also spawned reckless revolutionaries on one hand, skeptics on the other.
There's a big job ahead.
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