LUCKY MATHEBULA | When the state retreats, the mob advances

South Africa is not yet a failed state. Its constitution stands, elections are held, courts function, budgets are passed, and citizens still speak the language of rights. Yet this formal architecture increasingly coexists with a harsher reality: in many communities, the state is present in name but absent in function. South Africa is becoming governmentally empty.

This is not a society without politicians, laws or institutions. It is one in which governing structures exist but fail to perform: a clinic without medicine, a police station without order, a border without effective control, an immigration regime without dependable administration. The state has not vanished. It has become operationally thin.

That is the deeper meaning of the crisis over foreign nationals. It is not only about migration. It is about state authority, citizenship and democratic trust. Migration has become the arena in which citizens experience administrative breakdown: who may enter, stay, work, trade, and access scarce public services and on what legal basis.

Communities are angry about unemployment, crime, informal trading, overburdened clinics, overcrowded schools and weak border management. Migrants, asylum seekers and refugees experience fear, exclusion and sometimes violence. Between these realities stands a state unable to enforce immigration law, process documentation efficiently, or distinguish between lawful migration, asylum protection, undocumented presence and criminality.

Into this vacuum step civic formations, issue-specific advocacy groups and political entrepreneurs. When the government cannot visibly regulate public order, society begins to improvise. Improvisation then hardens into self-appointed enforcement. A demand for order may express a legitimate grievance, but when it abandons legality, it threatens the constitutional order itself.

The republic needs a state that can act lawfully, competently and visibly.

The targeting of foreign nationals at clinics and public facilities is not merely an immigration issue. It shows that sections of society no longer believe the state can enforce public rules fairly. The question “who belongs?” has become inseparable from “who receives?”. Within the context of one of the most refugee-, asylum seeker-, and immigrant-friendly regulatory frameworks, the lived experiences of nationals under such frameworks generate discontent that can easily be political capital for political entrepreneurs on either side of the pendulum.

A democratic state must protect human dignity, including the rights of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. But it must also define, defend and prioritise the rights and obligations of citizens.

This distinction is not xenophobia. It is constitutional administration. Citizenship is the core membership of the democratic community: the basis for choosing government, holding office, claiming a sense of belonging, and demanding reciprocal duties from the state. Non-citizens also have rights, but those rights do not abolish the need for a coherent citizenship regime. Rights without order produce resentment; order without rights produces authoritarianism. To be documented as a foreign national stabilises your status within the constitutional and democratic order.

The foreign national crisis has become combustible because the state has allowed different questions to collapse into one another. Illegal entry is not refuge from persecution. Poor border control is not skilled migration. Pressure on clinics is not solved by civilians demanding identity documents at the gate. Crime by a foreign national is not proof of collective guilt. The challenge is to govern these distinctions, not evade them.

The government of national unity now faces this test. It may either restore governing capability or deepen the emptiness it inherited. It must be judged by whether it makes government work where society most brutally experiences its absence.

That means migration cannot be treated as a public relations irritation. Home affairs, the Border Management Authority, the police, municipalities, labour inspectors, health authorities and intelligence structures must function as a single system. Immigration administration requires credible registration, reliable documentation, lawful enforcement, efficient asylum processing, labour market regulation, municipal planning and regional diplomacy.

This does not legitimise vigilantism. No democratic society can allow private groups to decide who may enter a clinic, attend a school, trade in a street or remain in a community. The authority to verify identity, enforce immigration law, arrest, detain or deport belongs to the state. The cure for state failure cannot be social coercion masquerading as patriotism.

There is no contradiction between compassion and control. A serious state can protect refugees and enforce immigration law; welcome skills and punish illegality; prioritise citizens and respect non-citizens; and secure borders and avoid cruelty. What it cannot do is drift. Drift turns administrative failure into ethnic suspicion and civic anxiety into mobilisation against vulnerable people.

The task before the GNU is to hold society and government together. It must restore the democratic connection before governmental emptiness becomes the defining condition of South African life. The republic needs a state that can act lawfully, competently and visibly. Without that, democracy will remain written in the constitution while citizens, migrants and communities confront one another in the void left by government.