MATHATHA TSEDU | Cynical forces behind anti-foreigner marches exploiting state failure

You don’t have to be a scientist to understand the combustible cocktail of poverty and anger over uncontrolled illegal immigration.

It also doesn’t take special insight to see how we ended up here, and also that there are monied forces behind the rent-a-crowd that moves around the country, clad in new T-shirts, waving expensive printed banners, extolling the virtues of a pseudo-nationalism.

At the centre of it all is a government whose immigration policy, from its inception, assumed life would be as rosy as that envisaged in the mythical rainbow nation.

Add to that a governance system that has virtually collapsed, as the Border Management Authority battles a tidal wave with few resources and a string of drones. Meanwhile the army that is supposed to stop illegal crossings collects tariffs from operators of mukoro dinghys ferrying everything from cigarettes to stolen cars across the borders.

The arrest of a man with more than 30 passports and wads of cash near the Lebombo border in August 2024 was a mere blip on the screen of our news cycle, because we have accepted that the system is rotten.

When Chief Takalani Gumbu of the Ha Gumbu area in Niani, east of Musina near the Zimbabwe border, refused to have his area used as a conduit for illegal cigarettes trafficking, he was shot and killed. We saw it, heard it, but moved on because “these things happen”. It was not treated as the serious national security issue that it was.

A number of media outlets have exposed corruption at the Limpopo border, from collapsible fences that cost millions of rands to the “wall” on the Mozambican side that is no wall at all.

The tide of drug mules being arrested at OR Tambo International Airport and the groups of Pakistani immigrants coming in on fraudulent visas as well as the latest R1bn drug bust at Beit Bridge are all indicative of a system buckling under pressure that it is ill equipped to withstand.

While some of the issues affect the affluent parts of our society, the bulk of the drugs, cigarettes, and sheer human presence ultimately end up in the already overcrowded informal settlements and villages. The drug problem within the black community and its impact on the kids now known as “bo-Nyaope”, is not getting the media attention and societal concern it should, because the poor no longer have a voice. They and their problems no longer matter, except as voting fodder.

Coupled with the invasion of the black business areas by mainly Pakistanis, Ethiopians and Somalis, whose business practices in the main show little concern for hygiene and food safety, all these lead to a sense of siege down in the bottom rungs of the poverty ladder.

Opportunistic activists with visible money have since moved in, leading march after march, from KuGompo to Katlehong to eThekwini, fighting a battle that has taken an anti-African immigrants stance.

Ghana has extricated some of its citizens, decrying the inability of the state to both process applications for asylum and work permits in time, and protecting its vulnerable citizens. Nigeria has debated the protests in its Senate, with calls for a boycott of South African companies and goods.

And now we have the president reminding us of the debt we owe our brothers and sisters from our continent. That appeal will fall on deaf ears, because the issue is not afrophobia, but the inability of the state to maintain its own laws.

From traffic officers to police to immigration officials and soldiers, too many are on the take. You just have to watch the Madlanga Commission for 30 minutes to realise we have no police force anymore. The drugs that are confiscated in drug busts are stolen from the police holding centres — by police.

A total overhaul of the system is needed — with a new ethos and new officials imbued with a sense of national duty and not self-enrichment. The kind that former president Thabo Mbeki called the new cadre.

It is clear that the renewal campaign within the ANC has achieved little. And communities realise they are on their own and have to depend on their own wits, analysis and understanding of their problems to find solutions on their own.

Hence the marches, which are nothing more than a cry for help by besieged communities feeling let down by a government they have repeatedly returned to power over 30 years.