I was pleasantly surprised to see, in a report put out by Henley & Partners who do the Visa Restrictions Index, that South Africa ranks higher than I suspected it would.  It is a ranking according to how many countries of the world you can visit without needing a Visa and while we are not that high on the list, and the list is dominated by the countries like the UK and the USA, whose residents can all visit 174 countries without a Visa, we did not do as badly as I might have thought we would have.  

In some ways it is a measure of the power of a country and it is not far off, if one really thinks about it, an international overall waiting of one’s country because countries negotiate amongst each other to determine whether or not Visas will be required by the citizens of that country.  In terms of our cricket and rugby opponents, New Zealand and Australia were way above us with 170 and 168 countries respectively that they can visit Visa free, with South African passport holders being able to visit 97 countries.  On the plus side, we have beaten most of the African countries and we are certainly ahead of Iraq and Afghanistan which are the bottom countries on the list where residents of those countries can only visit 31 and 28 countries respectively without Visas.  Some of the countries that rated higher than us include Macedonia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Israel, Iceland, etc.  Where the survey is a little bit flattering to us is when they say we have position 41, they don’t count all the positions that are tied, so for example there are five countries that are tied for first place and then they have a further two countries tied for second place which in theory should of course be tied for sixth place.  That means that there are not just 41 countries ahead of us on the list, there are probably about 60.  That does not affect everybody and many people, including some of my employees, have citizenship of more than one country and then of course they can travel internationally on a passport that does not require a Visa entrance to countries.