After the Bell: Saying no to digital nomads

Fairy tales often begin with the words, “Once upon a time…” but it turns out, not always. Sometimes fairy tales begin with the words, “If elected, I promise…”

I know. Old joke. But a function of journalists in the modern era is to go back to speeches made by politicians to see if they kept those promises. This form of journalism is particularly pertinent in SA because we are all pretty miserable now, so political speeches have the important purpose of trying to cheer us up a bit. This — perhaps unwisely — leads to promises.

President Cyril Ramaphosa is very prone to making these kinds of speeches; often when you listen to a State of the Nation Address, reading between the lines, you can tell that someone in the Presidency has had an idea and issued an instruction to what is described in SA as a “line department” that is “tasked” with putting it into effect. But the line department has neither a desire, nor the ability, nor the interest, nor all of the above, in doing said function.

One of the great ideas to arise out of the pandemic was to try to cash in on the new trend of working from home by issuing “digital nomad” visas. Since some classes of employees are no longer required to work from the office, they could notionally work from anywhere. Although in some places offices are full again, in most they are decidedly not. In New York, for instance, offices are still only about half-full. 

For the host country, a digital nomad is, on balance, a win, because the employee in question is not reducing the number of jobs available in that country but is increasing the local income. It’s not much different from having tourists in your country where you are in effect exporting goods and services without having to transport anyone anywhere; they come to you. It’s also easy to organise, since in effect you are issuing what is just an elongated tourism visa.

About 30 countries have introduced programmes to attract digital nomads, including Spain, Portugal, Canada and Namibia. So, here is the question: When did Ramaphosa promise that SA would introduce its digital nomad visa? The answer is almost two years ago.

The province most keen on the idea of a digital nomad visa, sometimes called a remote working visa, is of course the Western Cape. Cape Town is just a fabulous place to work if you are a digital nomad; it’s cheap by international standards, safe-ish, naturally beautiful and reasonably tech-savvy.

The Western Cape government is consequently kinda grumpy about how long this is taking, putting out a short press statement on Friday on the topic. It points out that Minister of Home Affairs Aaron Motsoaledi has missed his own deadline to introduce the visa by the end of June. It had been 527 days since the undertaking to introduce the visa was given, according to the province.

It is worth noting that the announcement was made in April 2022, and it was mentioned again in the State of the Nation Address in February 2023. But listen, it was only a promise made by the head of state in a public address to the nation. Twice.

Maybe Ramaphosa should start his next State of the Nation Address with the words, “Once upon a time…” DM