South African anti-migrant protests are a political scapegoat based on lies, says activist

Sharon Ekambaram is one of those helpers. She’s a member of Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia, one of several organizations standing against the anti-migrant rhetoric and violence that’s taken hold in the country.

Five people have been killed since the protests began in April, organized by anti-migrant groups March and March and Operation Dudula. Thousands of migrants, both documented and undocumented, have been driven from their homes, or had their businesses and property vandalized.

On Tuesday, demonstrators took to the streets in cities across South Africa, many wielding sticks and clashing with police as they attempted to enforce an arbitrary deadline they set for all undocumented immigrants to leave the country.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has rejected the unofficial deadline, and urged protesters not to commit violence or vandalism. But Ekambaram says the government got the country into this mess by scapegoating migrants for its own failure to address widespread unemployment and inequality.

Here is part of her conversation with As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

What are [people] telling you about why they feel they cannot stay?

They are just trying to save their lives and are needing to get out.

It’s a shocking situation for a country like South Africa, which is lauded for its constitutionally enshrined human rights and constitutionally enshrined respect for human dignity.

The majority are people from the African continent, our brothers and sisters, who were forced to leave. Yes, they followed the procedures, they were processed by the Department of Home Affairs, but they couldn’t stay here because they were being targeted unlawfully by vigilante groups.

What kinds of supports are you able to offer the people who, as you say, feel they have no choice but to leave when, in fact, they had come to seek safety or better lives?

The South African Council of Churches rallied [across] denominations and they made their presence felt across the country in responding with food, with things like nappies, and the little that we could do to give some dignity to the people that were getting onto buses and getting out of the country and being delayed in long queues.

We worked with other organizations to manage a hotline, which was the toll-free number that we advertised broadly in the communities and on social media platforms. And lawyers were available, health-care workers were available on standby, to respond if there was any need.

And we did respond. There were quite a large number of people that called in who needed a legal intervention. They were either unlawfully arrested and detained, or evictions taking place.

I think that that was very, very important for South Africans to organize ourselves and take stand against what is really a tiny minority of people who have opportunistically [been] abusing the fact that there is serious issues in our country of social inequality, of poverty, of unemployment, and to use division and hatred for whatever means.

Where is this latest vitriol coming from?

Out of the 2024 elections, we saw all the political parties, most of them, converge on the scapegoating of migrants and blaming migrants for all our social ills.

It’s about elections. It’s about blaming migrants, because it’s a way to detract from the real issues of corruption and mismanagement.

It’s a real setback because we need to be organizing ourselves and holding our government to account to ensure that we transform this country — the country that has been ravaged by apartheid and colonization. The impact of that has resulted in us being one of the most unequal societies in the world.

[The government] should have transformed our country, should have ensured resources are allocated and we have an abundance of resources in comparison to the rest of the African continent. And that money should have been allocated to ensure that there’s quality service delivery, that there are decent jobs, and that we have quality health care and education. And we still don’t have that.

But it’s easy to blame the migrants.

What do you believe the government should be doing differently?

We should be addressing the inequality in our country.

The impact of COVID was, according to the president himself, [that] we lost over 200,000 jobs.

Any caring government would consider a universal income grant to address the fact that there’s 60 per cent unemployment of young people in our country, and there’s close on 40 per cent unemployment in the country.

Those are the ways in which we are going to deal with the incredible, increasing inequality … and then that can lead towards addressing the other systemic problems in the country. But it’s not going to be by focusing on trying to get rid of the migrants.

The manipulation and the disinformation on social media platforms has created this narrative, which has now become a fact. Because if you’ve repeated a lie often enough, it becomes a fact that we have a problem of migration. We don’t.

This country and the wealth of the mining industry was built on the back of super exploitation of migrant labour.

So the claim that it’s the migrants that [are the] problem and that we must focus our attention on dealing with issues of documentation is a real detraction away from what the state should be doing. — Sheena Goodyear