BY MBANGWA XABA:
There is a peculiar arrogance in the statement that one “is not afraid of white people because they grew up with them”. It is the kind of patronising argument that mistakes proximity for progress and personal experience for political principle. Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, leader of the March and March movement, has wrapped herself in the language of patriotic citizen mobilisation while increasingly aligning herself with forces whose political project sits uneasily with the democratic and constitutional order established after apartheid. Her campaign against undocumented foreign nationals is therefore not a solution to the problems confronting poor South Africans. It is a dangerous politics of scapegoating, dressed in the language of popular frustration.
We must interrogate this charade carefully. Ngobese-Zuma seeks to position herself as the “voice of the voiceless”, yet her political alliances raise serious questions about the direction of her movement. She has spoken of wanting to “build a school” and “learn from” AfriForum, an organisation whose political project has frequently presented South Africa as a country in decline under its current democratic leadership. As political commentator Percy Mabandu has observed, such an alignment evokes historical attempts by Afrikaner and Zulu nationalist forces to find common ground around opposition to the constitutional settlement that replaced apartheid. The contradiction is obvious: formations separated by race and history can nevertheless discover common ground when narrow ethnic or sectional interests take precedence over the broader democratic project.
To stand politically alongside AfriForum carries consequences that cannot simply be wished away. Its campaigns and positions on international pressure, trade and South Africa’s relationship with Western powers raise legitimate concerns about the extent to which some domestic actors are prepared to invite external intervention in our internal affairs. At the same time, Ngobese-Zuma’s attacks on foreign nationals risk undermining South Africa’s economic and social relations with the rest of the continent. These may appear to be different political projects, but they can produce a similar outcome: weakening African solidarity at precisely the moment when continental economic integration is most necessary.
The suggestion that rounding up undocumented workers will somehow solve South Africa’s housing, unemployment and service-delivery crises is a dangerous simplification. These are structural problems rooted in decades of inequality, economic exclusion, weak state capacity, corruption, inadequate planning and an economy that has failed to absorb millions of working-age South Africans. Ngobese-Zuma has made sweeping claims about the “achievements” of her movement, including claims that protests have freed school places and saved the state millions in healthcare costs. Yet the KwaZulu-Natal education authorities rejected the assertion that foreign children were displacing South African pupils. The department indicated that pupils had been accommodated and that Addington Primary School, which became a target of the March and March campaign, was 63% South African.
The Constitution is equally clear: the right to basic education belongs to every child in South Africa. Treating the presence of foreign children in public schools as an illegitimate occupation of scarce resources fundamentally misunderstands both our constitutional order and the nature of the problem. The Eastern Cape High Court has also affirmed that children cannot simply be excluded from public education because they lack the required documentation. The answer to pressure on our schools is therefore not to turn vulnerable children against one another, but to demand that government expand capacity, improve planning and ensure that every child receives the education guaranteed by the Constitution.
This brings us to the heart of the matter. Ngobese-Zuma is not simply an angry citizen reacting to circumstances beyond her control. She is building a political platform around legitimate grievances among unemployed and economically marginalised South Africans, but directing those grievances towards foreign nationals rather than towards the deeper structural failures that produce poverty and exclusion.
Her proposed solution to the migration crisis is deceptively simple: secure the borders, repatriate undocumented migrants and strengthen immigration enforcement. But even she has acknowledged that her June 30 deadline had largely failed, conceding that “the majority of them are still here”. That admission points to a much bigger problem. Border management, immigration administration and Home Affairs capacity have been weakened by years of institutional failure. No populist slogan can substitute for an effective state.
Research by the Human Sciences Research Council also illustrates the complexity of public attitudes towards migration. A significant proportion of respondents expressed negative views towards immigrants, while many associated foreign nationals with crime. These sentiments should not simply be dismissed, but neither should they be exploited. The danger is that legitimate anger arising from unemployment, poverty, crime and failing public services is redirected towards people who are themselves often vulnerable and economically marginalised. In this way, the poor are encouraged to fight among themselves while the structural causes of their poverty remain untouched.
The real cost of this rhetoric is therefore not only the possibility of violence. It is the destruction of social and African solidarity. The African Continental Free Trade Area represents one of the continent’s most important opportunities for economic integration and emancipation. South Africa cannot simultaneously proclaim its commitment to African integration while treating African migrants as economic invaders. Our neighbours are not the cause of South Africa’s economic crisis.
There is a troubling parallel here. When AfriForum seeks international pressure or intervention against the South African state, and when populist movements portray African migrants as the source of our domestic failures, both approaches risk diminishing our capacity to solve our own problems through democratic institutions. One looks outward for salvation; the other looks inward for someone to blame. Neither offers the poor a sustainable economic programme.
We should therefore see the politics of March and March for what it is: a populist response to genuine social pain that risks becoming a vehicle for division. The unemployed are real. The housing crisis is real. Crime is real. The failures of Home Affairs and border management are real. But foreign nationals cannot be made the convenient explanation for all of these failures.
South Africa’s poor deserve better than scapegoats. They deserve jobs, functioning schools, decent housing, safe communities, reliable public services and an economy that gives them a meaningful stake in the country’s future. They deserve political leaders who will confront the state, business and economic structures responsible for exclusion rather than turning neighbour against neighbour.
It is therefore time to stop treating Ngobese-Zuma’s politics as merely the expression of misguided activism. We must interrogate the political project that lies beneath the rhetoric. When a movement simultaneously invokes patriotism, ethnic identity, hostility towards migrants and alliances with formations historically associated with a very different conception of South Africa, serious questions must be asked.
The language may have changed, but the danger of political mobilisation through division remains familiar. South Africa has travelled too far from apartheid to allow poverty, unemployment and legitimate frustration to become instruments for rebuilding the walls that our democracy was created to dismantle.
The question is not whether South Africans should have control over their borders. Of course they should. The question is whether border management can become a substitute for economic transformation, whether migrants can be made scapegoats for state failure, and whether ethnic and racial divisions can once again become the organising principle of our politics.
We should reject that politics decisively.
Mbangwa Xaba is a veteran anti-apartheid activist, freedom fighter and businessman. – @NewsSA_Online
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