Over the past couple of weeks, one of SA’s long-delayed dialogues was vaulted to the national consciousness when members of Operation Dudula embarked on a spree of denying access to healthcare facilities for individuals they believed were illegal immigrants.
The rise of Dudula in recent years has coincided with the rise in nationalist sentiment in SA and across the world. In the build-up to the 2024 national election. PA leader Gayton McKenzie scaled up his rhetoric with a focus on the SA-Zimbabwe border.
This involved visiting Beitbridge to identify those who were seeking to cross over illegally. McKenzie’s rhetoric resonated with enough people for the PA to earn a couple of seats in parliament and for McKenzie himself to end up with a cabinet post.
Across the world the rise of leaders such as Nigel Farage, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni and Donald Trump has forced countries to engage in a new reckoning about their migration policies and practices. When this intersects with long-standing socioeconomic anxieties regarding social displacement within communities, the potential escalates for nationalist sentiment to resonate deeply.
In SA, the problem seems to be the fact that poorly secured borders have created an immigration crisis, where those without documentation are able to make their way to SA. When a country has no idea who is within its borders and what their needs are, the ability to ensure proper resource planning is compromised.
Operation Dudula taps into this impulse by positioning itself as a grassroots movement concerned by the resource allocation crisis associated with a lack of data about who is in SA and what they are doing.
For services that have to be distributed indiscriminately — such as healthcare and education — there is an elevated need to understand migration patterns better, to know who to serve. Gauteng, the smallest province in land area but carrying the largest population in the country, has an annual crisis that is captured in the basic education system, where the number of new classrooms and seats required reflects its pull effect as a living destination.
For those within the country’s borders illegally the motivations for being here vary, but the common feature is that weak border controls enable it to happen. The resultant problem is that when resources have to be allocated, the possibility of shortages looms large. In a country laden with resources and jobs scarcity, failure to address root causes creates a fertile environment for organisations such as Dudula to emerge.
The resonance of their message for some is reflective of long-standing anxieties associated with too many citizens feeling the system is broken and that their own plight might improve if “others” are prevented from participating in the job market or in the distribution of public resources. Once enough individuals have taken it upon themselves to address what they regard as a crisis that affects them, citing constitutional rights as the answer barely swings the pendulum.
As we see with service delivery protests across the country, a patchwork approach to addressing problems only enables them to fester. SA’s poor record at managing its borders, plus the pull effect of the country as a potential destination for job seekers, means that the current crisis will persist and escalate.
While the healthcare and education sectors are ripe for targeting due to their proximity to affected communities, the scale of discontent is far wider than that, and in the absence of proper solutions, movements such as Dudula and political parties such as the PA will continue to find supporters for what they say they are trying to fix.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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