PETER ATTARD MONTALTO: Why visa policy is so important to SA’s growth prospects
Who cares about visas? There is so much else going on in SA it’s sometimes a wonder why there is so much attention paid to this one issue. Surely employment and inequality, let alone Eskom, are more important issues to be grappling with? Yet such a view would totally misunderstand the central nature that visas have taken up within the reform nexus of policy in SA. Visas are so important precisely because they are so simple to fix and so frustrating (especially for the tourism industry but also business at large) in the lack of action. There have been two highly specific state of the nation commitments to fix both the tourism and business visa issues, as well as numerous mentioned throughout the past year by the most senior politicians. Yet no meaningful steps forward have been taken. Visas are an important issue, partly for the random reason that it has been alighted on by (quite literally) everyone as a seminal and single point of focus to measure the reformist credentials of Presi...
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