A few days ago I decided to torture myself and watch Nigerian broadcaster Ireti Bakare-Yusuf’s interview with Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, the leader of the xenophobic hate group March and March for the Borderlines podcast on Nigeria Info FM.
For two hours, she invented fake statistics and used the Trumpian strategy of “flooding the zone with shit” — as Steve Bannon, US President Donald Trump’s former political strategist, arrogantly said — to overwhelm the media and deflect attention from the real issues of unemployment and chronically low GDP growth for so long. At one stage, Bakare-Yusuf asked her about the jobs crisis, but Ngobese-Zuma was not interested. She continued spewing xenophobic hate against people from Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Ngobese-Zuma said estimates of the number of “illegal immigrants” that were made in separate studies were between 15-million and 30-million people. Stats SA had estimated the South African population at 65-million in 2022. This meant that South Africa had a population of 80-million, using the lower estimate. The truth is that there are no such studies. Since 2022, Stats SA has published five reports that have so much information about international migrants. The UN department of economic and social affairs has its own estimates.
Using 2025 population estimates, we can conclude that the number of international migrants is between 2.5-million (3.9% of the population) and 3.2-million (5.1% of the population). To be clear, these are not estimates for documented international migrants. Stats SA does not ask people about their legal status in South Africa or for their identity documents.
The domkop xenophobes must understand that “undocumented” does not mean that international migrants are not counted. Stats SA knocks on the doors of your Congolese neighbour. The estimates are for documented and undocumented international migrants. In 2022, Stats SA said South Africa had a population of 62-million — not 65-million plus 15-million — and that estimate included 2.4-million documented and undocumented international migrants.
Ngobese-Zuma told Bakare-Yusuf that she had started her xenophobic hate group based on another unsupported claim — that “25 children” had died in South Africa after eating “imported foods” from spaza shops that were owned by foreigners in early 2024. “The spaza shops are not run by South Africans. They are owned by Somalis and Ethiopians,” she said. However, a civil society campaign that was led by scientists, members of the South African People’s Tribunal on AgroToxins, rejected the attempt to scapegoat spaza shops and foreigners for the deaths. A petition blamed highly hazardous pesticides such as Terbufos and called for the government to ban them within three months.
Incidentally, according to Census 2022, there were 51,831 Ethiopians (0.08% of the population) and 15,838 Somalis (0.03%) in South Africa. There were also 24,718 Nigerians, 0.04% of the population, a little lower than the 26,431 who were counted in Census 2011. Ngobese-Zuma, the empress of xenophobic scapegoating for domestic policy economic policy failures, told Bakare-Yusuf that there are so many Zimbabwean teachers in South African schools ― “remind me to give you the statistics later,” she said with a straight face.
However, in a campaign to counter xenophobia after March and March and Operation Dudula thugs prevented children from attending a primary school in Durban, basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube said there were 3,240 foreign teachers in public schools in 2025. This was 0.8% of the 411,203 educators in public schools. Xenophobes are the most brainless and politically bankrupt people in South Africa.
• Gqubule is an adviser on economic development and transformation.
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