YESHELEN GOVENDER

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There’s a frigid wind sweeping through our country today. It’s a wind that is entirely man-made. It has nothing to do with our turn into a colder season but has everything to do with our spiral into dangerous intolerance and xenophobia.

Many people are agonising over whether to use this word “xenophobia”, but I am not one of those. If we want to be generous, then we can maybe use “Afrophobia”. Or if we want to be supremely generous, then we call this an “anti-migrant” movement. Whatever term we wish to use for these violent attacks, we cannot use the term “anti-illegal migrant”, as many are wont to do.

The people perpetrating these attacks, and those leading them, do not differentiate between legal, documented migrants and those who lack documentation. To say that they are an “anti-illegal migrant” movement is to provide them with legitimisation and allows the cover for more human rights violations to be committed.

I am aware of hundreds of documented refugees who have been intimidated, attacked and forcibly displaced. These are documented refugees from some of the most volatile regions in the world such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Burundi and Rwanda.

They have been denied the full protection and support of the South African state after having been attacked by vigilante groups. In Durban, we witnessed an almost total abdication of the state’s constitutional mandate to ensure the safety and security of all those who live within South Africa.

Hundreds of refugees have been left to sleep on the pavements outside the home affairs refugee office on Che Guevara Road. At one point this group numbered more than 500; thankfully the number has dropped to about 200-230 men, women and children. As at the time of writing, these refugees had been at the Che Guevara site for more than a month.

The xenophobia outbreak is orchestrated and manufactured, weaponising legitimate concerns about unemployment, lack of service delivery and a stagnant economy

They have been provided with essentials such as food, water, clothing and medication. But not by any state department; it is civil society organisations and individual citizens who have stepped up to display compassion, empathy and sheer humanitarianism in this dark time. This Che Guevara Road group of refugees includes entire families, some with children as young as nine months.

They are not indigent, they were all employed or running their own small businesses. They definitely don’t support claims that “all migrants are criminals”, or that they do not contribute to our tax base and are simply exploiting resources meant for South Africans. These refugees have paid taxes, they purchase goods and they are VAT compliant. They make healthy contributions to our society.

This outbreak of xenophobia is not “organic”. Discussions with the refugees clearly show that they experienced the most targeted discrimination in the past few months, and they draw a direct link to the rhetoric spouted by the anti-migrant movement’s leaders. The xenophobia outbreak is orchestrated and manufactured, weaponising legitimate concerns about unemployment, lack of service delivery and a stagnant economy.

There are many questions surrounding the opaque funding of movements such as March and March, or Operation Dudula. We need to interrogate whether there is outside influence, from state actors or even private sector actors. We need to look at why there seems to be an effort to destabilise South Africa.

I have been involved in an interesting discussion on whether our country is being destabilised to curtail our role in the Brics economic bloc. South Africa has always been a vital gateway into the rest of Africa and if we are isolated from Africa, as we increasingly are, we are unable to help expand Brics. Vital raw materials and rare earth minerals will continue flowing to the West, rather than being diverted into trade with countries such as China.

We need to challenge the premise that expelling migrants will play any significant role in reducing the poverty and inequality. We have a 32% unemployment rate, which translates into roughly 8.1-million unemployed South Africans, predominantly youth. The migrant population in South Africa amounts to about 3-million people. Just on a surface-level assessment, expelling every single migrant is not going to resolve our unemployment challenges.

We are being led by the nose into implementing self-destructive policies. Even worse, our political parties seem to be tacitly endorsing these regressive, anti-migrant sentiments rather than contesting them responsibly.

Yes, there is a cold wind sweeping through our country. But there are instances of compassion displayed by community organisations and broad civil society. They stepped in where the state and political parties have failed to fulfil their obligations; they provided humanitarian aid to those suffering hardship; and they prove that not all South Africans support the anti-migrant narrative. South Africans of conscience need to support these examples, and to support them openly. Evil thrives when good people do nothing.