South Africa has a xenophobia problem it has long refused to own. The refusal is now diplomatically, economically and reputationally expensive.
In late April and early May, Nigeria, Ghana and Mozambique each lodged diplomatic protests with Pretoria over the treatment of their nationals here. Nigeria’s foreign minister called her South African counterpart directly. Ghana summoned South Africa’s acting high commissioner. Nigeria announced evacuation flights for citizens wishing to leave. Two Nigerian nationals are reported dead in separate incidents allegedly involving South African security forces.
At the centre of the violence is the March & March movement, a campaign demanding the eviction of foreign nationals from South African communities. It began as a localised grievance and now generates political consequences out of all proportion to its organisational capacity. That is what technology-amplified activism does. It must be taken seriously by decision-makers, not dismissed as fringe.
The immediate trigger in KuGompo (formerly East London) was the installation of a Nigerian Igbo community leader as “Eze Ndi Igbo East London” (King of Igbo people in East London). Residents attacked Nigerian businesses and individuals. At least 26 Nigerians were reportedly injured and property worth millions of rand was destroyed. A community marking its cultural identity in a foreign land became, overnight, a flashpoint.
Whether the violence is justified is the wrong question; it obviously is not. The question that matters is what makes it possible, predictable, and recurring.
Why the violence keeps coming back
The Glossary on Migration of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) defines xenophobia as “attitudes, prejudices and behaviour that reject, exclude and often vilify persons, based on the perception that they are outsiders or foreigners to the community, society or national identity”. In South Africa, that disposition does not operate in a vacuum. It operates in one of the world’s most unequal societies, against an official unemployment rate that has been above 30% for years, alongside chronic service-delivery failures and a political culture that has repeatedly found electoral utility in scapegoating.
Irregular migration, defined by the IOM as movement that “takes place outside the laws, regulations, or international agreements governing the entry into or exit from the state of origin, transit or destination”, is a legitimate governance challenge. South Africa hosts many irregular migrants, drawn by stronger economic conditions than those in neighbouring states. Managing that is a reasonable policy concern. But lumping every foreign national together, documented and undocumented, migrant workers and asylum seekers, families of two and three decades’ standing into one threatening category is not. It is politically convenient and analytically dishonest.
Crime concerns are, however, real and any claim of South Africa having a xenophobia problem while ignoring this reality would also be dishonest. As far back as August 2019, Nigerian high commissioner to South Africa Kabiru Bala stated publicly that more than 6,000 Nigerians were under investigation or facing proceedings for offences ranging from drug-related crimes and fraud to murder and armed robbery. Bala’s point was not to condemn his countrymen but to insist on the perspective that these cases belong in a due-process framework and they do not stand in for the broader Nigerian community. A credible response to xenophobia cannot pretend every grievance about crime is fabricated. What it must reject is the leap from “some individuals commit crimes” to “all foreign nationals are criminals”. That leap is logically invalid, and in the present South African climate it is an incitement to collective punishment.
Enforcement is not enough
South Africa has consistently mispriced this risk. The government’s standard response of condemnation of “fringe elements”, assurances that investigations will follow and ritual commitments to Pan-African solidarity satisfies no-one and changes nothing.
Left unmanaged, this kind of social activism escalates into internal conflict, geopolitical friction and reputational damage that has direct economic consequences. When Nigeria organises evacuation flights it is telling its business community, its diaspora and the continent that South Africa is not a safe operating environment. When Ghana’s foreign minister calls the attacks “extremely disturbing”, the message reaches boardrooms and investment committees well beyond Accra.
There are exceptions. Since taking office in July 2024, home affairs minister Leon Schreiber has tightened enforcement of the migration ledger. Inland deportations rose about 30% in 2024/25 to 51,560 and a further 12% in 2025/26 to 57,784, a cumulative increase of 46% over two years. When Border Management Authority removals are added, total enforcement actions against illegal immigration now exceed 600,000. Schreiber casts this as rule-of-law administration rather than xenophobic signalling. When the state visibly enforces immigration law it removes one of the loudest rhetorical fuels for vigilante violence: the claim that the borders are out of control and citizens must act in the state’s place.
Though Schreiber has delivered enforcement, the cohesion side of the ledger looks markedly weaker. Social cohesion, in the standard formulation, is a social order “based on a common vision and a sense of belonging for all communities, where the diversity of people’s different backgrounds and circumstances are appreciated and positively valued”. In the government that brief sits with sport, arts & culture minister Gayton McKenzie. He entered office on an explicitly anti-immigration platform, the “Abahambe” campaign, and his public statements have drawn repeated criticism for inflaming xenophobic sentiment. Immigration policy is not his portfolio, but social cohesion is, and the cohesion brief is precisely what should be deployed to counter the rhetoric feeding street-level violence.
His department has run the standard menu of cultural clusters, community sport programmes and place-name changes. It has not used the cohesion brief to challenge the conflation of all foreign nationals with criminality. A government that pairs credible enforcement with a cohesion ministry sitting out the xenophobia debate is not delivering a coherent response.
South Africa’s standing as the continent’s most industrialised economy rests on its integration into regional trade networks, its attractiveness as a hub for African business and its credibility inside continental institutions. All of that is under strain.
Washington is watching
What makes the present moment serious is that state actors are implicated. Two Nigerian nationals died in circumstances pointing to South African security forces. Allegations of that kind cannot be managed through the standard playbook of condemning mob violence. But the problem runs deeper than this single crisis.
The US state department’s Trafficking in Persons report downgraded South Africa from tier 1 to tier 2 watch list, citing official complicity in trafficking crimes, inadequate prosecution and a government that “did not demonstrate increasing efforts overall”.
On March 12, the US trade representative launched section 301(b) investigations into 60 economies, South Africa among them. The question is whether failure to enforce bans on goods made with forced labour is harming US commerce. The 2025 “Trafficking in Persons Report” supplies the evidentiary basis. It flags agriculture, construction, mining and manufacturing as exposure sectors, with documented and undocumented migrants from neighbouring countries among the identified victims.
If the US trade representative finds South Africa’s antitrafficking record “unreasonable”, section 301 authorises retaliatory tariffs, quotas or suspension of trade concessions, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) included. The thread connecting trafficking vulnerability, irregular migration and xenophobic violence is the same: a state that has not built the capacity to manage migration humanely, consistently or transparently. That incapacity is now being priced into trade policy by one of South Africa’s largest export markets.
Among the nontariff demands Washington has tied to the section 301 process are “protecting rural communities from violence” and “condemning rhetoric that incites violence”. The cohesion failure now sits inside an active trade negotiation.
Business, investors and the state
Businesses that depend on migrant labour in agriculture, logistics, hospitality and retail face supply chain and operational risk if the violence escalates or if the government crackdowns on irregular migration intensify. Companies with regional footprints across Southern and West Africa face reputational exposure if they are seen as passive amid attacks on African nationals. And investors with exposure to South Africa should treat this as a structural shift, not a passing news cycle.
Exporters in agriculture, mining and manufacturing carry an additional risk. The section 301 investigation draws on the same trafficking and labour-monitoring failures beneath the xenophobia crisis and the remedies it authorises. The xenophobia file and the trade file are converging.
Owning the problem
Social cohesion cannot be legislated into existence; it must be built through public education, honest political leadership, economic inclusion, and the sort of community-level engagement that earns trust before a crisis rather than during one. South Africa has spent the past decade hoping the next outbreak of xenophobic violence would not arrive. Each one has arrived and has been worse than the last.
South Africa’s founding democratic narrative was, in part, a Pan-African one. The moral solidarity extended to it during the liberation struggle came from across the continent, including from the countries whose nationals are now being attacked on its streets. That history does not obligate South Africa to ignore its governance challenges. But it does raise the stakes of how it responds to them.
South Africa cannot hope to confront its xenophobia problem until it owns it. That means moving beyond ritual condemnation towards a reckoning with the structural conditions (economic, political and institutional) that make this violence predictable. It means treating migrants in an irregular situation as a policy challenge to be managed within a human rights framework, not a threat to be weaponised for political gain. Enforcement, however competent, is not a substitute for political leadership that refuses to trade in scapegoating; the two must move together, and at present they do not. The cost of inaction is now diplomatic, commercial and written into the trade policy of South Africa’s major partners.
• Davhie is research associate at the Centre for Risk Analysis, focusing on political risk and foreign policy.
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