This past week, South Africa celebrated its 32nd anniversary of Freedom Day. In the same week numerous organisations and political parties marched against illegal migrants, some peacefully, others violently.
The president’s live audience seemed relatively small, perhaps because most of his would-be audience were engaged in looking for a different kind of freedom than he was referring to. Most of them were clearly looking for freedom from migrants of African origin.
The dominant strand of the ongoing migration debate is that illegal African migrants should return to their respective countries.
The reasons given vary, ranging from what seems legitimate to the absurd. The first common thread is that they have taken jobs and economic opportunities that belong to South Africans. The second is that illegal migrants are mainly responsible for crimes, and given that they are not traceable in the migration system, the fight against crime in South Africa becomes an impossible task. The third is a cocktail of jumbled reasons, with accusations ranging from migrants taking South African women, to smelling unclean, to the fact that illegal migrants are cowards running away from their countries rather than staying in the fight for democracy.
The root of these kinds of arguments should be understood in historical context. In South Africa, a lot has occurred in the past three decades — on social, political and economic fronts.
The public discourses of democracy, poverty, inequality and unemployment are no longer in their infancy as they were in the early 2000s.
Consequently, they’ve lost their innocence, and are therefore laden with a measure of exhaustion and, to an observable extent, dishonesty.
The urgency that once was, seems no longer, partly because the apartheid history is well in the rear-view mirror and it is becoming harder for those who govern to cite apartheid as the reason for persistent poverty and unemployment.
The challenge is that unemployment is more than statistics, it’s livelihoods. It’s human dignity. It’s a case of household heads unable to provide basic needs for their children.
Consider this: in just 14 years (2040), democratic South Africa will have existed as long as the apartheid regime — 46 years. Yet, unemployment has increased from 29.5% in 2001, declining to a record low in 2007 (22.7%) before rocketing up to 32.4% in 2025. It should be considered that the National Development Plan, the country’s development blueprint, which targets 6% by 2030, is clearly a mission impossible.
The challenge is that unemployment is more than statistics, it’s livelihoods. It’s human dignity. It’s a case of household heads unable to provide basic needs for their children.
And economic desperation does not leave individuals rational or neutral. If Aristotle is right, poverty is the parent of revolution and crime, and inequality is a weakness fatal to the state. That’s where South Africa is staggering in 2026.
Academic research has been largely critical of the catastrophic failures of the state which seems ill-equipped to govern markets and society.
The increasing failure of the state to facilitate development and to deliver basic needs — water, sanitation, electricity and roads — remains glaring evidence of a state that has long retreated from developmental state aspirant to less than a basic sort.
The emergence of anti-migration narrative in South Africa fits into the above analysis.
To state the obvious, to employ anti-migration as a political, social or economic tool is to commit society to a black hole, a dead end with no answers to any question.
The prevalent public arguments against migrants hold no intellectual capital and are unworthy of any serious thought. Yet they are dangerous notions which mask the veracities of a troubled state.
The difficulty is not that there is a new public discourse of anti-migrant variety. The risk lies in a retreating state, seemingly unaware of the social impulses it is unleashing in such retreat.
In one sense the aftermath is this: the state seems unable to maintain law and order on the borders, and by so doing enables irregular in-migration.
Then South Africa’s poor and working class, whose long wait for economic freedom seems futile, employ extra-judicial means to address what is clearly state failure. The era of lawlessness and civil unrest is emerging, as a response to a failing state.
Writing to the church in Thessalonica during the first century, Paul spoke of mystery of lawlessness already at work at the time yet restrained by an actor whose departure would unleash the full force of lawlessness.
In my proposition, the mystery of lawlessness is social forces of disorder which are emerging in the form of militias, civic organisations and political parties. Their mission is self-interest, their means anti-intellectual and extra-judicial.
The state, which is the restraining force is rapidly disintegrating. This inevitably leaves a trail of social chaos, and anti-migration is just the beginning.
As the American abolitionist and women rights activist Sojourner Truth observed two centuries ago, in times of social disorder, the rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.
The rich in South Africa are reasonably shielded by capital — for now. The unemployed and jobless turn to African migrants for answers, also for now.
But African migrants are a negligible social fraction in South Africa’s deepening disorder. There is more to come unless the restraining force returns on stage.
- Jason Musyoka is a development economist, philosopher and theologian.
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