Quality of life woos migrants back home

For years South Africa suffered as its best educated and skilled individuals left but now many are making the reverse journey.

JOHANNESBURG // London feels like "the greatest city on Earth", according to Justin Foxton, but he is much happier living on the Indian Ocean in South Africa. For years South Africa suffered from a brain drain of major proportions, as hundreds of thousands of its best educated and most skilled individuals left to seek better lives abroad. But now a steady stream of people are making the reverse journey.

Mr Foxton, 35, who spent six years in the British capital setting up and running a corporate theatre company before returning, is one of them. "What brought me back was first and foremost I'm a South African at heart," he said. "I absolutely loved my time in the UK, but I never felt I was truly at home. It was an issue of where your heart lies more than anything else." There are also practical benefits, he points out. The cost of his sprawling 1,337-square-metre house in Umhlanga, outside Durban, complete with two self-contained outbuildings, was about half that of the 82-sq-m two-bedroom flat he lived in near Hampstead Heath in north London.

"Life in London is a very much more difficult life to live; the bump and grind of life is very much more pronounced," he said. "The quality of life is infinitely higher here." Two of Mr Foxton's three siblings have also moved back home, but their situation runs counter to the usual South African perception. Global mobility has increased dramatically in recent decades, with more and more people willing to uproot themselves and travel thousands of miles in search of opportunities. Rarely, though, is emigration as common a topic of conversation as it is in South Africa, where crime levels are astronomic.

More than 50 people are murdered a day and 36,000 women were raped last year. In Johannesburg's wealthier suburbs, almost every house is protected by an electric fence, security doors and burglar bars, and fitted with panic buttons that can alert a private armed response security service in an instant. At the same time, many whites believe that the government's "black economic empowerment" policy hampers their chances of finding work.

A survey of South African expatriates last year found that nearly 80 per cent were between 25 and 49. "This has major implications for South Africa's economy for it is the most productive age group," said the Development Bank of South Africa, which commissioned it. "It is clear that South Africa is losing its main brain power. More than 72 per cent of the respondents possess over a post matric [tertiary] qualification. It is also a further indication of the mobility of the highly qualified respondents."

The most common destinations for South Africans are the United Kingdom, Australia and the UAE. Nonetheless a spokesman for Stuttaford Van Lines, the country's biggest removal firm, said that for every person it moved to Britain, it moves 1.5 people back to South Africa. "Some are young couples that come back for work, some South Africans are coming back who are older with families, some come back to retire," she said.

Nationwide, the exact numbers of those leaving or returning are impossible to determine because the government does not maintain the statistics and the tax authorities do not publish their own figures. But Martine Schaffer, managing director of Homecoming Revolution, a privately funded non-governmental organisation that encourages South African expatriates to return, said its website hits had reached a new high, with 18,500 unique users last month, up by one-quarter from last year.

"There's always a flip side in all situations," she said. "Yes, people are leaving, but people are still coming back. "It's a sense of belonging, of being African, of not having to explain your sense of humour; it's being understood, fitting in, having an emotional attachment to something familiar, [walking] into a supermarket and having someone actually say 'hello' to you; it's the high veld thunderstorms, the wide-open bush.

"For a lot of people, it's wanting to be part of creating a new South Africa and also exposing their children to it. This is a land of opportunities now." The organisation mounts recruitment fairs in London and Dubai - the UAE has an estimated 100,000 South Africans - where major companies, largely in the financial services, health care, engineering and information technology sectors, try to tempt expatriates to return.

Even so Ms Schaffer - who lived in London for 15 years - admitted there are challenges. "We suffer from an inferiority complex in this country, and, therefore, we believe the grass is greener on the other side, and for some people it will be, but for some people, the green grass is growing right under their feet. "We have got to stop comparing ourselves to countries which have had democracies for hundreds of years and have infrastructure we are trying to create."

Crime is the biggest factor pushing people out of South Africa, she said, and often the biggest obstacle to their return. For his part, Mr Foxton said he was "just ready to come back. I didn't let it stand in my way." He has since set up an anti-crime campaign, Stop Crime Say Hello, which seeks to reduce violence by promoting a friendlier and more reconciled society. "I know a lot of people who live in terrible fear," he said, although his own experience of crime was greater in London than at home. "By all means leave if you and your family are not secure in South Africa any more.

"My biggest problem is there are South Africans who go to the UK or Europe and feel they have to justify their decision to move by slagging their country off," he said. "I think that does us a tremendous amount of harm." @Email:[e-mail]