Anti-immigrant crisis in South Africa, matters arising

Imagine being the darling of the world only a few years ago for daring to take on genocide from the southern tip of Africa in faraway Gaza, only to become the hub of rampaging xenophobes hunting down “foreigners” and meting out violence to them on the pretext that they are taking the jobs of South Africans.  

A kind of mini-genocide, with a radio host, reminiscent of the role hate speech played through radio in what eventually escalated into the full-blown Rwandan genocide that the world regrets today.  

Back then, the perpetrators dehumanised their victims by describing them as “cockroaches” and thus lost any sense of humanity in dealing with them.

They treated them literally as cockroaches to be crushed to death.

We can only hope that it never gets to that in South Africa.

But it could. If the government continues with its lukewarm posture.  

There are illegal immigrants everywhere in the world, but nowhere is the enforcement of immigration laws ceded to lynch mobs with a distorted view of their economic victimhood and an inflated sense of their self-importance.  Never mind that these mobs mostly occupy the lowest rungs of South African society.

Only three weeks ago, former South African President Thabo Mbeki, talking about the persistently high unemployment situation in South Africa, said the quiet part loud and promptly drew the anger of some his compatriots for daring to say what has been obvious for decades.

He told a television station that most of the unemployed in South Africa are in fact “unemployable” because “they don’t have the skills that the modern economy and society need.” 

But he merely stated a reality that the government has tried over the years to address by publishing a “scarce skills list” and inviting applicants from around the world to fill vacancies that the South African economy cannot fill from the local talent pool.

Special visas are ready for those willing to make the jump, but the programme has had limited success, partly because of South Africa’s reputation as a high-crime (and violent) society, a reputation worsened in recent years by the periodic upsurge in murderous attacks on African migrants by unemployed vigilantes frothing around the mouth. 

What are some of the scarce skills?

They range from nurses, pharmacists, and product managers all the way to external auditors, actuaries, civil engineers, electrical engineers, and structural engineers, among many others, according to the 21st February 2026 edition of Business Tech, a South African publication.  

These were the skills that built the South African economy into the giant it became prior to the end of apartheid and for most of the time since.

Their scarcity, not foreigners, is at the heart of the unemployment crisis.  

If the 2022 South Africa population census and other reports are anything to go by, the situation of high unemployment co-existing with widespread skills shortages could only get worse (before it gets better, if at all):  

The white population, the most educated, with about 28 per cent having university degrees, has declined from 11 per cent in 1996 to 7.3 per cent in 2022; many are emigrating to places like Australia and the UK, taking with them precisely the kind of high-quality skills the country needs to function in a knowledge-driven economy.

It may decline further yet by the next census. 

By contrast, only five per cent of Blacks, who make up over 80 per cent of the total population, have university education.  

The vast majority (along with Coloureds) barely make it through high school, with high dropout rates, low completion rates and “limited progression to tertiary education,” becoming, as Mr Mbeki bluntly put it, unemployable. 

“Conversely,” notes the census report, “white and Indian/Asian population groups are more likely to be concentrated in the completed secondary school and post-secondary education levels.” 

That may explain why they are not in the streets blaming “foreigners” for their problems.  

They got the memo. And got with the programme.

Increasing outward migration by Black professionals has further shrunk the available talent pool among the wider Black population.

The leftovers, or the “unemployables”, are the people wielding clubs and baying for the blood of “foreigners” for taking their jobs, even when it’s clear they can’t fill existing vacancies, and the vast majority of these foreigners, legal or not, particularly from other parts of Africa, create their own jobs because they don’t qualify for government grants, which they subsidise through the taxes they pay, either in the form of income taxes or indirect taxes like VAT.  

That’s the labour supply part of the equation.

The labour demand part, driven by economic growth, is no better.

When apartheid ended in 1994, the manufacturing sector accounted for 21 per cent of GDP, providing employment opportunities for a range of low-skill and high-skill workers; by 2024, this figure had plunged to 12.8 per cent, with no immediate relief in sight, as a 15+ year electricity crisis continues to hobble businesses, suppress growth and destroy jobs, especially for the Black majority.

Some older Black South Africans speak wistfully and openly of a time in their youth when there were ample employment opportunities in much safer streets and communities.  

Blame

Experts have blamed the plunge in manufacturing (and the overall decline in economic growth to a trickle) on everything from under-investment in critical infrastructure (ports, electricity, and transport) and a steady deterioration in human capital, despite a post-apartheid increase in access.

Fourteen years ago, Trevor Manuel, the former finance minister, appearing before the National Assembly, expressed concerns over a new practice where education inspectors were prevented from entering classrooms in predominantly Black schools to check the quality of teaching.

He warned that the practice boded ill for the country’s human capital formation and overall development; it appears that the chickens have come home to roost.  

Blaming – and harming – foreigners for a problem that is clearly not of their making is not the way to go.

The government should move in quickly to curb the attacks and follow that with the kind of rapid and comprehensive reforms that the challenge of the “unemployables” poses to national prosperity, social stability and continental unity.  

As the Pan-Africanist and leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, Julius Malema, has pointed out, today it is “foreigners”; tomorrow it could be him being asked to go back to his home province of Limpopo, because he and his tribesmen are supposedly taking jobs from others in another province.

Our fates are more interlinked than we care to acknowledge.

It’s time for sober minds to prevail for our common good as Africans.

It’s time to honour the memory of Nkrumah, Mandela, Nyerere and other pioneers of Pan-Africanism.

The writer is chairman of the National Development Planning Commission