When Foreigners Become the Alibi for Failure

Scapegoating begins when citizens search for a visible cause of invisible structural failure. It becomes political when leaders discover that blaming foreigners is easier than explaining corruption, unemployment, failing clinics, broken municipalities and stolen public money.

In 2019, at the start of the flare-up of attacks against foreign nationals in South Africa, I wrote an op-ed highlighting the striking resemblance between the underlying factors that led to the 1969 eviction of Nigerian immigrants from Ghana, the 1983 expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria, popularly called “Ghana Must Go,” and the unending cycle of violence against black migrants in South Africa. The lesson from Ghana and Nigeria is not that the cases are identical, but that societies under economic pressure often reach for the same false cure: expel the outsider, then discover that the structural crisis remains.

In retrospect, I was wrong to fall into the false characterisation of the nature of that violence, from whom to whom. In the myopic imagination of belonging held by these people, the wrongness is being black or brown African in South Africa. Following from that, and to better understand the character of the violence and the problem at hand, it is logical to call this what it is: Afrophobia.

For instance, I have not seen or heard of these perpetrators “hunting” for non-black or non-brown foreign nationals. In fact, in a display of their lesser regard for black and brown Africans, a recent viral clip of March and March co-leader Ngizwe Mchunu greeting a German woman exposed the racial selectivity of South Africa’s anti-immigrant politics. After she said she had lived in South Africa since 2007, Mchunu smiled and told her, “You are part of us now. You are no longer a German.” The warmth of that exchange sharply contrasts with the movement’s hostility toward African migrants.

That clip is not the whole proof, but it is illustrative of the wider problem. In addition, deaths related to attacks of this nature have been exclusively black and brown victims. As such, the anger is not evenly directed at all foreign nationals. It falls most violently on black and brown Africans, the people easiest to mark as outsiders and easiest to punish. This is why Afrophobia, rather than simply xenophobia, better captures the pattern. The issue is not simply “foreignness,” but which foreigners are imagined as belonging.

Let’s shift gears to the core of this discourse, which is why some South Africans blame black and brown Africans for every socio-economic ill in the country. We can look at it from two intertwined angles: first, as a psychological scapegoat, and second, as a political tool.

The scapegoating argument is that the transition from apartheid to democracy raised expectations of jobs, housing, services and redistribution. When those expectations were not met, some citizens displaced their frustration onto non-nationals rather than the institutions responsible for policy failure. However, this is not the same as saying “poverty causes xenophobia.” The stronger and more defensible claim is that material hardship creates frustration, but narratives decide where that frustration lands.

Government failure is abstract. A migrant neighbour, shopkeeper or worker is visible. That is why anger that should move upward toward institutions is redirected sideways toward people with less protection. For instance, Masikane et al. framed the attacks as xenophobia and links them to frustration and relative deprivation, while Chisadza’s study of South African Social Attitudes Survey data from 2003 to 2018 finds that anti-immigrant attitudes are associated with beliefs that immigrants increase crime, take jobs and use up national resources.

As such, black and brown Africans become the human face of structural failure. These weaker groups are visible in townships, informal settlements, spaza shops, clinics and labour markets, while government corruption, weak economic policy, municipal collapse and budget mismanagement are less visible and harder to confront directly. For instance, at the time, it felt natural for Nigerians and Ghanaians, aided by governments that shaped where public anger should land, to blame non-nationals for their problems. In fact, I will take a controversial stance here. South Africans may need to exhaust the false explanation before they fully confront the real source of their problems. Why do I say that? My reasoning is simple. People rarely abandon a convenient explanation simply because they are told it is false. They usually abandon it only after it fails to solve the problem it promised to solve. Until the “framed other” is exposed as a false solution, attention is unlikely to shift to the institutions responsible for unemployment, corruption and poor governance. Nigeria offers a useful example. Although there has been a slow but growing awakening among Nigerians, many now recognise that the country’s socio-economic problems are not caused by the ‘new other’ – ethno-religious differences but by decades of poor governance, corruption and weak institutions. Ghana, despite recent incidents that suggest a fading historical memory, appears to have travelled further along that path than Nigeria.

Scapegoating begins as a psychological release, but it becomes dangerous when politicians discover that misplaced anger can be organised, branded and turned into power. This brings us to the second point: Afrophobia is also a political instrument.

Over the years, I have seen how political leaders turn Afrophobia into a political instrument by curating an easy-path narrative that converts broad frustrations into a simple story: “You don’t have a job because Zimbabweans or Malawians have taken it,” or “Nigerians are to blame for every social ill prevailing in the country.” Available data does not support this narrative.

Take, for example, the issue of crime. Prison data is not the same as full crime-by-nationality data, but it is a useful proxy. And that proxy does not support the claim that foreign nationals are driving South Africa’s crime crisis. Data from South Africa’s Department of Correctional Services, supported by the World Prison Brief, shows that about 9 in every 10 sentenced prisoners in South Africa are South African nationals. That is, 87.6% of sentenced inmates are South Africans, while non-nationals make up 12.4% of those convicted offenders.

What is sinister about these mobilised Afrophobic attacks is that these emergency lovers of South Africa, I assume, either know or ought to know that the available data does not support their claims. Yet they continue to traffic in falsehood. I would broadly categorise them into three groups.

First, there are those in power who deflect accountability. They convert governance failure into outsider threat in an effort to shield themselves from solving unemployment, corruption, policing failures or service collapse. For example, Fikile Mbalula, the then-Police Minister and current ANC secretary-general, has been cited as saying Zimbabwean ex-soldiers were in South Africa “robbing banks” and “promoting criminality.” The tweet below from an X user better captures this cognitive dissonance. More recently, similar rhetoric resurfaced following Nigeria’s request that South Africa compensate Nigerians who fled anti-migrant violence and abandoned property during the unrest. Responding on behalf of the government, Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni rejected the request, saying there would be no compensation. She then added that the government would instead be interested in Nigerians showing authorities where their “drug dens” were so they could be shut down. Whether intended or not, the effect of such remarks is to reinforce the association of an entire nationality with criminality rather than distinguishing between individual offenders and millions of law-abiding migrants. In a society already grappling with anti-immigrant sentiment, official rhetoric of this kind risks legitimising the very stereotypes that feed Afrophobic mobilisation. In actual fact, her statement exposes the inherent incompetences of the government which she serves. Because, one would expect a country with drug problems for its government to be proactive rather than reactionary in dealing with such issues.

Second, there are those who use Afrophobia for votes. They remain politically relevant without proffering real and sustainable solutions to South Africa’s socio-economic challenges. Most notable among them are Herman Mashaba, the leader of ActionSA, and Gayton McKenzie, the Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture and leader of the Patriotic Alliance.

Third, there are those who use vigilante politics as a ladder into formal politics. Operation Dudula is a recent example of this political-tool dynamic. It gained popularity as an anti-migrant vigilante group staging actions against non-nationals, framing undocumented migrants as criminals who “must go back to their country.” As reported by AP, in some notorious instances, the group blocked non-nationals from accessing public health clinics. In 2023, the group registered as a political party to run for elections. And if the natural evolution of such vigilante groups tells us anything, we are only a few months away from the Jacinta-led group either joining a political party or forming one. After all, in a faltering economy, politics becomes lucrative.

On the economic front, without discounting the historical complexity of South Africa’s socio-economic development, one must critically interrogate the notion of jobs being “stolen.” The question is not whether migrants work. The question is why South Africa’s economy is too weak to create enough work for its own people. What is the health of South Africa’s economy? Is it strong enough to generate jobs? Are people productively engaged?

The available data points to a structurally weak economy, insufficient and incapable of absorbing new entrants into the labour market. For example, between 2016 and 2025, the economy grew by an average of 0.7%. Such a growth rate is too weak to reduce unemployment meaningfully or reverse joblessness. It is also below South Africa’s own National Development Plan, which assumed average real GDP growth of about 5.4% to support mass job creation and reduce unemployment.

It is almost, if not, asinine to describe small enterprises built by non-nationals, often with their own resources and often employing locals, as “stolen” jobs. Some political figures, even Herman Mashaba, the leader of ActionSA, have acknowledged these failures by pointing to government “job-killing policies” and poor education as blocking factors to the employment revolution.

Whether psychological scapegoating and political tooling explain why some South Africans have resorted to the self-defeating tactics of Ghana’s 1969 and Nigeria’s 1983, I still, in good faith, echo my prior warning to those South Africans who have fallen for this gimmick: if foreign nationals left South Africa tomorrow, who would these politicians and vigilante groups blame next? Would they blame a person from the Eastern Cape for stealing jobs from another in KwaZulu-Natal? Or would they blame someone from the Western Cape for causing a spike in the crime rate in Gauteng? Or would the young Tsonga man or woman suddenly become not South African enough?

As it has been in the case of Nigeria and Ghana, I surmise we would only know after the first “other” is removed and the next “othering” becomes the focus.

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Asikabulu Michael

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