In 2008 I went to visit my son in Arusha, Tanzania. One day I went for lunch with his mum, who worked for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The country’s home affairs minister joined us. Before long the group had grown. I will never forget the fear and horror on everyone’s faces. They wanted to know what was happening in SA. I had no answer. I was ashamed to be a South African.
During that year there were 72 deaths and 150 incidents related to xenophobic violence. Since then there have been repeated waves of attacks against international migrants, who have been scapegoated for the government’s mismanagement of the economy. From 2009 to 2021 there were 794 incidents and 322 deaths, according to Xenowatch.
Xenophobia is now out of control in SA. But I never thought the day would come when the ANC government would stoop so low and pander to xenophobes. In February 2022 the department of employment & labour published two documents — a draft National Labour Migration Policy and an Employment Services Amendment Bill — that responded to rising xenophobic sentiments by proposing a quota for the employment of international migrants.
In the section on peace and stability, the ANC’s draft resolutions presented to its national conference called for SA to review its accession into the UN’s 1951 Convention on Refugees and the 1967 Protocol on the Status of Refugees. It called for the abolition of citizenship through marriage, the implementation of the labour migration policy and the establishment of immigration courts. Another draft resolution scapegoated international migrants for crime: “Our uncontrolled migration and social change have also contributed to the proliferation of international criminal syndicates.”
A submission by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute and Lawyers for Human Rights says: “The bill and the [labour migration policy] create the impression that government is reacting to recent mass anti-immigrant sentiment by adopting a policy that feeds into the narrative that immigrants occupy a large sector of the SA job market. Pitting local workers against migrant workers, whether in public discourse or proposed legislation, has the potential to further fuel xenophobic tensions.”
International migration should not be seen as primarily a security issue. There are powerful macro-political and economic factors in the region that have contributed to international migration in Southern Africa. International migration is a function of unbalanced economic development in the region. In 2021 there were 3.9-million international migrants in SA, Stats SA says. According to my estimate about 62% of the international migrants are from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho.
Migration from Zimbabwe has been due to a huge SA foreign policy failure. The political and economic meltdown in Zimbabwe has been the No 1 driver of international migration in Southern Africa over the past two decades. Ruth First showed that Mozambicans started moving to SA before the 19th century gold rush to work in Natal sugar plantations and the Kimberley diamond fields. By 1906 they accounted for 65% of the people working on SA mines. Basotho have been working in SA since the mid-19th century. The border between the two countries makes no sense. I get offended when people say Basotho are illegal foreign nationals.
In 2020 SA accounted for 91% of the GDP in the Southern Africa Customs Union and 53% of the GDP within the Southern African Development Community. SA’s most important foreign policy priorities should be to help achieve peace and security in the region, and build a strong and balanced regional economy. It must underwrite the regional integration project, which has stalled because we show no interest in it and send dog whistles to the xenophobes.
As Siphamandla Zondi, director of the Institute for Pan African Thought & Conversation at the University of Johannesburg, told me: “SA will benefit most from regional integration and suffer most from the lack of it.”
• Gqubule is research associate at the Social Policy Initiative.
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