The great Eastern Cape brain drain continues apace.
Statistics South Africa’s mid-year population estimates, released last week, show that almost one-million people left the province between 2016 and 2026 for greener pastures.
Even taking into account the 394,200 people who moved into the Eastern Cape during the same period, the province suffered a net loss of almost 600,000.
Most of these people went to the Western Cape or Gauteng.
The flight of skilled people from the province is not a new revelation.
The steady erosion is reflected in Stats SA’s annual reports, on which the Daily Dispatch regularly reports.
The reasons are also not new.
More than half the adult population of the Eastern Cape (54.4%) is unemployed.
The chance of getting a job in the Western Cape, with its relatively low 19% unemployment rate, is far greater.
The number of available jobs in the Western Cape increased by more than 22,000 in the first quarter of this year while the Eastern Cape shed hundreds of job opportunities.
Dysfunctional provincial and local government has resulted in huge disinvestment in the province.
Companies are going elsewhere to run their businesses in environments which are more conducive to productivity and profit.
Any province that has a stable supply of water, electricity and decent road and rail networks has to be better than the Eastern Cape, with its increasingly decrepit infrastructure, poor basic education outcomes and collapsed health services.
As our people flee to better-run and resourced regions, they bump up the equitable share budget of the province in which they settle while the Eastern Cape loses out.
With fewer resources, it is even more incapable of creating an environment which would attract rather than repel investment and people.
It is precisely the productive, skilled and qualified people that this province most needs who are constantly lost to it.
And round and round it goes.
Black Business Forum president Luthando Bara correctly points out that the exodus is a measure of “declining economic confidence and diminishing opportunity”.
All of that is driven by poor governance.
If local governance in the Eastern Cape were better, the province would feel more orderly, hopeful and alive with opportunity
The people of this province remain largely loyal to the ANC despite it having failed them so profoundly at the level of local governance.
If the ruling party could simply improve at that one level, people would undoubtedly prefer to stay, work and invest in the place they call home.
Daily Dispatch
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