Home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi has extended the end of 2022 deadline by which people living in SA under Zimbabwean exemption permits must leave the country. They now have to leave by the end of June 2023.
The news has been presented as a reprieve for the estimated 178,000 Zimbabweans affected by the move. In fact, it is a reprieve for SA, which has in effect postponed the moment when we become just another immigrant-hating country.
I propose a programme of civil insubordination against this expulsion, delayed or otherwise. We have no right to throw people back into countries we have worked so hard to help destroy. SA bent over backwards to accommodate Robert Mugabe and his savage regime, and we are doing the same for his successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa.
We have protected Zimbabwean state violence against its own citizens and the destruction of its own economy. It is because SA could not find the moral cojones to stand up to the deplorable leadership in our northern neighbour that so many of its citizens have fled here.
We have no right now to send these poor souls back to the living hell we consciously helped create. The prancing on TV recently by Limpopo health MEC Phophi Ramathuba, in front of a Zimbabwean patient who had the temerity to fall ill in SA, is but a simple reminder of how intellectually retarded the ANC and its provincial matrons have become.
I propose we set ourselves against the expulsion of Zimbabweans. Those who behave outside the law should be dealt with by a functioning police force. Otherwise, I will help in any way I legally can to frustrate their expulsion, to try to protect, hide, feed or care for anyone affected by this shameful treatment of our fellow Africans and neighbours. We cannot do this and count ourselves among the civilised nations of the world.
“Getting rid” of Zimbabweans will create not a single job in SA, no matter how fiercely the anti-immigrant lobby and outright xenophobic might believe otherwise. In fact, the opposite is true. Just two years ago international relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor told an audience that “sometimes I shudder when I imagine what might happen if all the maths and science teachers were to leave SA schools, many of whom come from Zimbabwe”.
Well, exactly. We attract some of Africa’s best and brightest. But Pandor is at the forefront now of justifying the need for the expulsions. Doing her job, no doubt. Her father, Joe Matthews, would be ashamed. I first met him when he ran a warm and friendly store in Gaborone, in exile. No-one there thought of him as a problem.
If SA had any sense it would look at the world from more than one perspective. If you’re the EU you face a constant economically and politically debilitating migration from Africa. But they know African migrants have really only two places to go: to Europe or SA. If you were to take the equator as the dividing line between which direction migrants take, the EU would want that line to move north, meaning more of Africa would migrate south than north. Instead, with every hostile act against foreigners in SA the line moves south, meaning more people are going to go north.
Africans are going to move, and we can’t stop them. They’re born into despicable countries with leaders who never leave and abuse them at every turn, and with whom we insist on maintaining the friendliest of relations. One of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s closest friends among African leaders is Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power for 36 years.
But the further south that line moves the bigger problem the EU has. If we could move the line north, what could we get out of the Europeans? This is not to bargain with African lives but rather to recognise a stark reality: we are a potential solution to one of Europe’s most pressing social and economic problems. What would they be prepared to pay for it to go away? What level of investment could we expect by opening our borders to more immigrants, rather than trying to chase them away?
But we don’t have the luxury of bright minds in government. Watching the new KwaZulu-Natal leadership of the ANC rush off to former president Jacob Zuma for advice and benediction nicely rounds off the portrait of what we have become.
Thabo Mbeki and Trevor Manuel left office with a budget surplus in place. That’s all gone now. Ramaphosa can reform away, but he can’t make reforms stick. We are way too criminal for even the greenest of shoots to survive the comrades for long. They will have to be run out of power, and that will happen only when enough South Africans decide they’ve had enough.
That hasn’t happened yet, and the poor and damned foreigners in our midst are going to pay a terrible price until we come to our senses. I hope there are enough of us to make sure that the brutality of expulsion doesn’t happen quietly.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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