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As someone who grew up and went to uni in SA, then later emigrated to NZ (and later Europe) in 2007, this is completely expected. My understanding is that what

As someone who grew up and went to uni in SA, then later emigrated to NZ (and later Europe) in 2007, this is completely expected. My understanding is that what happened is, in 1994 when the Apartheid government handed over power to the ANC, basically everything the government had in the pipeline was scrapped; of course it was in many ways an evil government, but it was also a surprisingly competent one, the only government to produce nuclear weapons and decide on their own to dismantle them or something? So anyway, all their plans for much-needed energy infrastructure upgrades were scrapped in 1994, and never considered again until the rolling blackouts started, by which time it was far too late. Since then the nearly universal corruption within the ANC and overall state capture meant things rapidly got worse, not better. I distinctly remember writing code to do periodic saves of a long running computation's state, because the power would just randomly go out, and at one point the power went out while saving the state, so I switched to saving A/B alternating state files. Most of my family is still hanging out in SA and things just get worse and worse... don't even get me started on the crime...

karp773 4y ago
Have they ever tried to emigrate? And if yes, why are they still there?
- pixelpoet 4y ago
  The harsh reality is that the programming half of the family got great job offers and stayed in NZ, the other didn't :(
  - karp773 4y ago
    So it's purely paperwork/legal barriers that hold them back? Otherwise they would have left?
    - pixelpoet 4y ago
      Yeah they came with and were not successful in their job searching, had to go back.
      - FredPret 4y ago
        That's horrible, I'm so sorry. I can't imagine a more discouraging turn of events
- sgt 4y ago
  I think this kind of energy crisis article gives a bit of a skewed perspective of SA. South Africa is still an absolutely brilliant place to live. I can say this because, well, I am still here and I am not planning on moving. It of course assumes you have a decent income and that you don't live in a dodgy neighborhood. Standard of living is very high. As for load shedding, you can easily mitigate this by putting up solar panels on your roof, an inverter and a bunch of batteries. You don't even need to pay right away, you just bake it into your bond (aka mortgage).
  - pixelpoet 4y ago
    > Standard of living is very high. Yeah, if you're willing to look the other way and lock your car doors in literally the most unequal country in the world: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coefficient-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coef... And since you're also a Saffer, I don't need to say anything about the daily threat from crime, and how everyone lives basically in a castle with electric fences. Do you have electric fences and private security? Of course, just like all the other white people in South Africa. Afrikaans was my first language, I know how it is over there. Sorry but I'm going to have to disagree about "brilliant place to live", having lived in so many countries (including Poland, Czechia, Germany, NZ, England, ...).
    - sgt 4y ago
      That's often the case - worse in the bigger places like JHB. No electric fence for us, but private security patrolling the neighborhoods yes (similar to ADT).
    - lelanthran 4y ago
      > Do you have electric fences and private security? Sure, but isn't private security and gated living (AKA security fences) becoming the norm in most of the middle-class suburbs in many other countries? > Sorry but I'm going to have to disagree about "brilliant place to live", Yeah, I wouldn't go so far as to call it brilliant, but my understanding is that, even if I move to another country, I'm still going to live in a secure place anyway, only it will be much smaller and more expensive, both at the same time.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > Have they ever tried to emigrate? And if yes, why are they still there? Because, while crime is high, and power is intermittent, it is not bad enough to make me give up my 700sqm house on a 2000sqm plot in a (somewhat safe) suburb close to everything, to live elsewhere in about a quarter of the space. Every time I look at emigrating I face a large drop in my standard of living if am in a similar role in any high-paying area in the US or UK.
  - ununoctium87 4y ago
    Don't forget the cheap servants
    - lelanthran 4y ago
      - lgleason 4y ago
        In countries like the US that is generally not something many software engineers can afford. In South Africa, as an engineer that is more affordable and more seem to have them from what I've seen.
        lelanthran 4y ago
        > In countries like the US that is generally not something many software engineers can afford. So? You think I'm staying in SA just because once every 7 days I pay someone to mow my lawn? How much money do you think I am saving by staying in SA and paying someone to mow the lawn?
        lgleason 4y ago
        I'm not criticizing you. It's just part of the difference in standard of living. In the US, only the rich can afford a domestic worker, because it would cost up-words of $200 a day. In South Africa it is a fraction of that cost even if you are paying above market rates.
- eloff 4y ago
  People do, but it's hard to get out. There are monetary controls, so you have to break the law to get your money out. You will also end up with very little once the exchange rate and fees are covered. So you will take a huge haircut on standard of living. But the standard of living in South Africa is something of an illusion anyway with horrific crime, a corrupt and incompetent government that confiscates private property, a jobs market heavily biased against people of non-African descent (very strong affirmative action), rolling blackouts, etc. My grandparents opted to stay and they did pretty much live out their days in relative comfort in their own house - but rarely saw their children or grandchildren. Source: my parents are from South Africa
  - zx76 4y ago
    Exchange control has been somewhat relaxed compared to when I'm guessing when your parents left. It used be insanely punitive. Provided you have up to date tax clearance I think you can now take R11m out the country per year. So approx. $600k per year. So people with a higher net worth than this who are leaving will have to a take a few years to fully financially emigrate, but it used to be much more complicated and restricted. If you have a substantially larger net worth you can also negotiate with the reserve bank! Famously Mark Shuttleworth - the Ubuntu linux founder - had a series of big court cases litigating some of these rules. He sold Thawte for approx $500m(?) to Verisign while South African but then moved to the UK. It's still a very unusual thing and foreigners are often surprised that a country with western style democracy has some China-style exchange controls.
  - kragen 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cryptocurrency_by_country_or_territory#Southern_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cryptocurrency_by_... says Bitcoin is legal in South Africa. I believe you when you say "you have to break the law to get your money out", because you know about a million times more about South Africa than I do, but how are they preventing people from using Bitcoin to get their money out?
    - zx76 4y ago
      There are much stricter rules now, KYC on exchanges etc. But up until 2017/2018 I'd say the tax authorities weren't paying much attention and I'd be surprised if people with money who wanted to get it out didn't take advantage.
- swarnie 4y ago
  Unsure if emigration is still a viable option. Most my family came back to the UK in the 90s and took a massive hit on currency conversion, its got so much worse since then.
perfecthjrjth 4y ago
Can one blame apartheid governments for today's problems? When can one stop blaming the apartheid? Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid governments have committed? Sure, corruption is one. How about competence? Competence and corruption can co-exist, though.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > Can one blame apartheid governments for today's problems? No. Too many other countries suffered worse and bounced back faster. > When can one stop blaming the apartheid? It will never happen. While the voters are all tribal in their support, the one thing they mostly agree on is racially-based legislation. In such an environment you do not expect the voters to ever dig themselves out of this. > Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid governments have committed? Sure, corruption is one. How about competence? Competence and corruption can co-exist, though.
  - antonvs 4y ago
    > No. Too many other countries suffered worse and bounced back faster. For example? One issue with apartheid is that it essentially withheld education from the black population. Sure, it had schools for them, but they were nothing like the standard of the schools for white children. So what's an example of a country with an essentially uneducated population of tens of millions who "bounced back(?) faster"?
    - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      Germany leveled to the ground in 1945, occupied up to 1955
      - chess_buster 4y ago
        Germany made the allies to believe much more factories and infrastructure were destroyed than actually were. Additionally Germany has been shortly before that the scientific center of the world regarding Physics, Chemestry, Engineering… So the land of the thinkers and poets ("Dichter und Denker") obviously had a different starting point, no? (I'm German, in case that matters).
buyx 4y ago
To add to your point: the roots of South Africa’s energy crisis date back to the early 90s, when the apartheid government was finishing up. Until the late 1980s, the apartheid government were into central planning, price controls and other state interventions (like many other western governments of that era). They started deregulating and privatising in the late 80s, and had already started cutting infrastructure spending by the early 90s. Thus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s they actually massively overbuilt electricity generation infrastructure. In the early 90s, electrification programmes were being rolled out in black townships to soak up the excess capacity. Of course, this excess capacity came with an opportunity cost, as all central planning tends to do. With the advent of the ANC government the emphasis switched to paying off South Africa’s national debt (which has largely been incurred by the apartheid government fighting proxy wars against the Soviet Union and Cuba). Finance minister Trevor Manuel and then-deputy president Thabo Mbeki, who pretty much ran South Africa from 1996 to 2008 continued and expanded the early 90s austerity. The economy actually did well during this period and South Africa was widely lauded internationally for its fiscal responsibility, however infrastructure investment didn’t keep up, as you point out, the public transport network (which the apartheid government misguidedly deregulated and handed to the free market in the form of the minibus taxi industry in the late 80s), the road network and other infrastructure started deteriorating through lack of maintenance and also failed to keep up with demand. The ANC government attempted to restructure the electricity network in the early 2000s to bring it into line with developments in the rest of the world (creating a market for generation), but by this time Mbeki’s AIDS denialism had cost him a lot of political capital with the left of his party (actually the trade union movement, COSATU in alliance with his party). The bottom line is that it was politically infeasible to restructure the electricity industry (the current government is trying again under duress). So without government build of new generation, and no private sector investment because of the stalled market reforms, demand eventually outstripped supply by 2007 (remember what I said about economic growth being relatively high in that era). Load shedding arrived in late 2007. It was actually a huge surprise when it started, and as you say, we were totally unprepared. The IT industry scrambled to install generators in offices. With the Soccer World Cup coming up in 2010, Eskom (the government body with a virtual monopoly on electricity supply and generation) ran its fleet hard, and also commissioned two mega coal power stations. Mbeki was replaced by 2009 with Jacob Zuma: Mbeki’s arrogance and his insane AIDS policies having finally done him in. Zuma, was of course, not a technocrat like Mbeki, but embodied some of the worst traits of a politician. Load shedding actually faded into the background for much of the early 2010s, but by 2015 or so, load shedding returned, as that lack of maintenance because of an electricity fleet that was being run too hard caught up. The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well. Eskom, despite recent efforts to clean it up, languished under a cloud of corruption and incompetence through the 2010s as part of a pattern of politically connected incompetents gaining purchase throughout the state. Water woes kicked in by 2014, with large parts of high-altitude Gauteng province without water because the pumps that raised water from dam catchments failed (they were repaired but it was a sign of how badly things were being neglected). There are rumours that hangers on from Zuma’s era are sabotaging Eskom from within…it’s hard to be sure, but regardless, it was left in a sorry state. South Africa is a constitutional democracy with strong institutions…the fact that it managed to survive the Zuma era without collapsing is a testament to that. However, the ruling ANC is run under the Leninist precepts of Democratic Centralism and thus the president of the ANC has enormous power because of the electoral dominance of the party (you could look to China’s CCP intrigues for an analogue). Even if Cyril Ramaphosa, the current president, and basically a good egg, manages to push through reforms, it may well be too late. The country could well be in a death spiral.
ls-lah_33 4y ago
> in 1994 when the Apartheid government handed over power to the ANC, basically everything the government had in the pipeline was scrapped It's worth noting that under the Apartheid government energy in SA was completely dependant on the state [1]. Then towards the end of Apartheid, due to sanctions - among other things, the government basically had to default on its debt causing the national currency, the Rand, to go into a bit of a tail-spin. To cover their expenses the old government took out a loan from the IMF just before handing over power [2]. These loans often come with commitments to reduce government expenditure, amounting to basically an austerity programme. I assume that is one of the main reasons that many of the promises of both the old government and the incoming ANC had to be scraped and replaced with essentially what amounted to series of austerity measures [3]. In 2020 the government once again took on a loan from the IMF, again with austerity conditions attached... and here we are, with a vaguely stable currency but a gradually failing economy. [1] I assume as basically a subsidy for the mining sector. [2] https://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/tad/extrans1.aspx?memberKey1=880&endDate=2099%2D12%2D31&finposition_flag=YES https://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/tad/extrans1.aspx?member... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_welfare_programmes_in_South_Africa#Growth,_Employment_and_Redistribution_(GEAR) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_welfare_programmes_in_S...
TMWNN 4y ago
>As someone who grew up and went to uni in SA, then later emigrated to NZ (and later Europe) My understanding is that NZ is the usual gateway for South African emigrants, who use it to get to their final destination (usually Australia). (Canada serves a similar function for those seeking to move to the US.)
- herodoturtle 4y ago
  > My understanding is that NZ is the usual gateway for South African emigrants Historically the top destinations have been Australia, UK, US, and New Zealand - in that order [0]. Anecdotally, many of our friends are also moving to The Netherlands, so I suspect that a more recent survey would reflect that. And within South Africa, there is also large scale "semigration" taking place from folks outside the Western Cape province to inside it (because the aforementioned province is arguably the best run in the country). [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180202090200/https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/131802/this-is-who-is-emigrating-from-south-africa-and-where-they-are-going/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180202090200/https://businesst...
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    >Historically the top destinations have been Australia, UK, US, and New Zealand - in that order Sorry, I meant "usual gateway for South African emigrants who can't get into Australia directly". I am aware that Australia is the #1 destination.
    - herodoturtle 4y ago
      I see what you mean :-)

karp773 4y ago

Have they ever tried to emigrate? And if yes, why are they still there?

pixelpoet 4y ago
The harsh reality is that the programming half of the family got great job offers and stayed in NZ, the other didn't :(
- karp773 4y ago
  So it's purely paperwork/legal barriers that hold them back? Otherwise they would have left?
  - pixelpoet 4y ago
    Yeah they came with and were not successful in their job searching, had to go back.
    - FredPret 4y ago
      That's horrible, I'm so sorry. I can't imagine a more discouraging turn of events
sgt 4y ago
I think this kind of energy crisis article gives a bit of a skewed perspective of SA. South Africa is still an absolutely brilliant place to live. I can say this because, well, I am still here and I am not planning on moving. It of course assumes you have a decent income and that you don't live in a dodgy neighborhood. Standard of living is very high. As for load shedding, you can easily mitigate this by putting up solar panels on your roof, an inverter and a bunch of batteries. You don't even need to pay right away, you just bake it into your bond (aka mortgage).
- pixelpoet 4y ago
  > Standard of living is very high. Yeah, if you're willing to look the other way and lock your car doors in literally the most unequal country in the world: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coefficient-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coef... And since you're also a Saffer, I don't need to say anything about the daily threat from crime, and how everyone lives basically in a castle with electric fences. Do you have electric fences and private security? Of course, just like all the other white people in South Africa. Afrikaans was my first language, I know how it is over there. Sorry but I'm going to have to disagree about "brilliant place to live", having lived in so many countries (including Poland, Czechia, Germany, NZ, England, ...).
  - sgt 4y ago
    That's often the case - worse in the bigger places like JHB. No electric fence for us, but private security patrolling the neighborhoods yes (similar to ADT).
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    > Do you have electric fences and private security? Sure, but isn't private security and gated living (AKA security fences) becoming the norm in most of the middle-class suburbs in many other countries? > Sorry but I'm going to have to disagree about "brilliant place to live", Yeah, I wouldn't go so far as to call it brilliant, but my understanding is that, even if I move to another country, I'm still going to live in a secure place anyway, only it will be much smaller and more expensive, both at the same time.
lelanthran 4y ago
> Have they ever tried to emigrate? And if yes, why are they still there? Because, while crime is high, and power is intermittent, it is not bad enough to make me give up my 700sqm house on a 2000sqm plot in a (somewhat safe) suburb close to everything, to live elsewhere in about a quarter of the space. Every time I look at emigrating I face a large drop in my standard of living if am in a similar role in any high-paying area in the US or UK.
- ununoctium87 4y ago
  Don't forget the cheap servants
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    - lgleason 4y ago
      In countries like the US that is generally not something many software engineers can afford. In South Africa, as an engineer that is more affordable and more seem to have them from what I've seen.
      - lelanthran 4y ago
        > In countries like the US that is generally not something many software engineers can afford. So? You think I'm staying in SA just because once every 7 days I pay someone to mow my lawn? How much money do you think I am saving by staying in SA and paying someone to mow the lawn?
        lgleason 4y ago
        I'm not criticizing you. It's just part of the difference in standard of living. In the US, only the rich can afford a domestic worker, because it would cost up-words of $200 a day. In South Africa it is a fraction of that cost even if you are paying above market rates.
eloff 4y ago
People do, but it's hard to get out. There are monetary controls, so you have to break the law to get your money out. You will also end up with very little once the exchange rate and fees are covered. So you will take a huge haircut on standard of living. But the standard of living in South Africa is something of an illusion anyway with horrific crime, a corrupt and incompetent government that confiscates private property, a jobs market heavily biased against people of non-African descent (very strong affirmative action), rolling blackouts, etc. My grandparents opted to stay and they did pretty much live out their days in relative comfort in their own house - but rarely saw their children or grandchildren. Source: my parents are from South Africa
- zx76 4y ago
  Exchange control has been somewhat relaxed compared to when I'm guessing when your parents left. It used be insanely punitive. Provided you have up to date tax clearance I think you can now take R11m out the country per year. So approx. $600k per year. So people with a higher net worth than this who are leaving will have to a take a few years to fully financially emigrate, but it used to be much more complicated and restricted. If you have a substantially larger net worth you can also negotiate with the reserve bank! Famously Mark Shuttleworth - the Ubuntu linux founder - had a series of big court cases litigating some of these rules. He sold Thawte for approx $500m(?) to Verisign while South African but then moved to the UK. It's still a very unusual thing and foreigners are often surprised that a country with western style democracy has some China-style exchange controls.
- kragen 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cryptocurrency_by_country_or_territory#Southern_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cryptocurrency_by_... says Bitcoin is legal in South Africa. I believe you when you say "you have to break the law to get your money out", because you know about a million times more about South Africa than I do, but how are they preventing people from using Bitcoin to get their money out?
  - zx76 4y ago
    There are much stricter rules now, KYC on exchanges etc. But up until 2017/2018 I'd say the tax authorities weren't paying much attention and I'd be surprised if people with money who wanted to get it out didn't take advantage.
swarnie 4y ago
Unsure if emigration is still a viable option. Most my family came back to the UK in the 90s and took a massive hit on currency conversion, its got so much worse since then.

perfecthjrjth 4y ago

Can one blame apartheid governments for today's problems? When can one stop blaming the apartheid? Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid governments have committed? Sure, corruption is one. How about competence? Competence and corruption can co-exist, though.

lelanthran 4y ago
> Can one blame apartheid governments for today's problems? No. Too many other countries suffered worse and bounced back faster. > When can one stop blaming the apartheid? It will never happen. While the voters are all tribal in their support, the one thing they mostly agree on is racially-based legislation. In such an environment you do not expect the voters to ever dig themselves out of this. > Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid governments have committed? Sure, corruption is one. How about competence? Competence and corruption can co-exist, though.
- antonvs 4y ago
  > No. Too many other countries suffered worse and bounced back faster. For example? One issue with apartheid is that it essentially withheld education from the black population. Sure, it had schools for them, but they were nothing like the standard of the schools for white children. So what's an example of a country with an essentially uneducated population of tens of millions who "bounced back(?) faster"?
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    Germany leveled to the ground in 1945, occupied up to 1955
    - chess_buster 4y ago
      Germany made the allies to believe much more factories and infrastructure were destroyed than actually were. Additionally Germany has been shortly before that the scientific center of the world regarding Physics, Chemestry, Engineering… So the land of the thinkers and poets ("Dichter und Denker") obviously had a different starting point, no? (I'm German, in case that matters).

buyx 4y ago

To add to your point: the roots of South Africa’s energy crisis date back to the early 90s, when the apartheid government was finishing up. Until the late 1980s, the apartheid government were into central planning, price controls and other state interventions (like many other western governments of that era). They started deregulating and privatising in the late 80s, and had already started cutting infrastructure spending by the early 90s. Thus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s they actually massively overbuilt electricity generation infrastructure. In the early 90s, electrification programmes were being rolled out in black townships to soak up the excess capacity. Of course, this excess capacity came with an opportunity cost, as all central planning tends to do. With the advent of the ANC government the emphasis switched to paying off South Africa’s national debt (which has largely been incurred by the apartheid government fighting proxy wars against the Soviet Union and Cuba). Finance minister Trevor Manuel and then-deputy president Thabo Mbeki, who pretty much ran South Africa from 1996 to 2008 continued and expanded the early 90s austerity. The economy actually did well during this period and South Africa was widely lauded internationally for its fiscal responsibility, however infrastructure investment didn’t keep up, as you point out, the public transport network (which the apartheid government misguidedly deregulated and handed to the free market in the form of the minibus taxi industry in the late 80s), the road network and other infrastructure started deteriorating through lack of maintenance and also failed to keep up with demand. The ANC government attempted to restructure the electricity network in the early 2000s to bring it into line with developments in the rest of the world (creating a market for generation), but by this time Mbeki’s AIDS denialism had cost him a lot of political capital with the left of his party (actually the trade union movement, COSATU in alliance with his party). The bottom line is that it was politically infeasible to restructure the electricity industry (the current government is trying again under duress). So without government build of new generation, and no private sector investment because of the stalled market reforms, demand eventually outstripped supply by 2007 (remember what I said about economic growth being relatively high in that era). Load shedding arrived in late 2007. It was actually a huge surprise when it started, and as you say, we were totally unprepared. The IT industry scrambled to install generators in offices. With the Soccer World Cup coming up in 2010, Eskom (the government body with a virtual monopoly on electricity supply and generation) ran its fleet hard, and also commissioned two mega coal power stations. Mbeki was replaced by 2009 with Jacob Zuma: Mbeki’s arrogance and his insane AIDS policies having finally done him in. Zuma, was of course, not a technocrat like Mbeki, but embodied some of the worst traits of a politician. Load shedding actually faded into the background for much of the early 2010s, but by 2015 or so, load shedding returned, as that lack of maintenance because of an electricity fleet that was being run too hard caught up. The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well. Eskom, despite recent efforts to clean it up, languished under a cloud of corruption and incompetence through the 2010s as part of a pattern of politically connected incompetents gaining purchase throughout the state. Water woes kicked in by 2014, with large parts of high-altitude Gauteng province without water because the pumps that raised water from dam catchments failed (they were repaired but it was a sign of how badly things were being neglected). There are rumours that hangers on from Zuma’s era are sabotaging Eskom from within…it’s hard to be sure, but regardless, it was left in a sorry state. South Africa is a constitutional democracy with strong institutions…the fact that it managed to survive the Zuma era without collapsing is a testament to that. However, the ruling ANC is run under the Leninist precepts of Democratic Centralism and thus the president of the ANC has enormous power because of the electoral dominance of the party (you could look to China’s CCP intrigues for an analogue). Even if Cyril Ramaphosa, the current president, and basically a good egg, manages to push through reforms, it may well be too late. The country could well be in a death spiral.

ls-lah_33 4y ago

> in 1994 when the Apartheid government handed over power to the ANC, basically everything the government had in the pipeline was scrapped It's worth noting that under the Apartheid government energy in SA was completely dependant on the state [1]. Then towards the end of Apartheid, due to sanctions - among other things, the government basically had to default on its debt causing the national currency, the Rand, to go into a bit of a tail-spin. To cover their expenses the old government took out a loan from the IMF just before handing over power [2]. These loans often come with commitments to reduce government expenditure, amounting to basically an austerity programme. I assume that is one of the main reasons that many of the promises of both the old government and the incoming ANC had to be scraped and replaced with essentially what amounted to series of austerity measures [3]. In 2020 the government once again took on a loan from the IMF, again with austerity conditions attached... and here we are, with a vaguely stable currency but a gradually failing economy. [1] I assume as basically a subsidy for the mining sector. [2] https://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/tad/extrans1.aspx?memberKey1=880&endDate=2099%2D12%2D31&finposition_flag=YES https://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/tad/extrans1.aspx?member... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_welfare_programmes_in_South_Africa#Growth,_Employment_and_Redistribution_(GEAR) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_welfare_programmes_in_S...

TMWNN 4y ago

>As someone who grew up and went to uni in SA, then later emigrated to NZ (and later Europe) My understanding is that NZ is the usual gateway for South African emigrants, who use it to get to their final destination (usually Australia). (Canada serves a similar function for those seeking to move to the US.)

herodoturtle 4y ago
> My understanding is that NZ is the usual gateway for South African emigrants Historically the top destinations have been Australia, UK, US, and New Zealand - in that order [0]. Anecdotally, many of our friends are also moving to The Netherlands, so I suspect that a more recent survey would reflect that. And within South Africa, there is also large scale "semigration" taking place from folks outside the Western Cape province to inside it (because the aforementioned province is arguably the best run in the country). [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180202090200/https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/131802/this-is-who-is-emigrating-from-south-africa-and-where-they-are-going/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180202090200/https://businesst...
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >Historically the top destinations have been Australia, UK, US, and New Zealand - in that order Sorry, I meant "usual gateway for South African emigrants who can't get into Australia directly". I am aware that Australia is the #1 destination.
  - herodoturtle 4y ago
    I see what you mean :-)