South Africa’s Xenophobia is a gun pointed inward
By Kojo Asiamah Addo
Xenophobic violence in South Africa is not new, but its targets shift. In May 2008, over 60 people were killed, mostly Mozambicans and Zimbabweans. April 2015 saw attacks in Durban and Johannesburg on Malawians and Zimbabweans. Between 2019–2021, Nigerians and Zimbabwean truck drivers were targeted. In recent weeks of 2026, Ghanaians and other West Africans have reported harassment and looting in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
The justification is always the same: “Foreigners steal jobs and economic opportunities.”
“After the last foreign-owned shop is looted, who is next? If the answer is ‘my neighbor’, then the strategy has failed.”
South Africa’s pain is real. Unemployment exceeds 32%, youth unemployment tops 60%, and crime drives businesses out of old Central Business Districts in Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Durban. Empty buildings spread as firms flee to secure nodes like Sandton — once farmland around Mandela Square, now a hub of hotels and offices.
But the diagnosis is wrong. The problem is not nationality; “it’s skills mismatch and policy failure”. South Africa has 12.9 million learners and over 1 million university students. The gap is in artisanal, technical, and professional skills. Migrants fill many of those roles, but so do South Africans. They also run spaza shops, drive trucks, and staff hospitals and construction sites — jobs often shunned or for which local training pipelines are weak.
What happens if “foreigners out” succeeds? Three things:
1. A labor vacuum: Townships depend on migrant-run supply chains. Remove them, shelves empty and prices rise.
2. Revenue collapse: Foreign businesses pay rent, VAT, and buy stock. Their exit accelerates urban decay and shrinks municipal income.
3. Crime turns inward: When the external scapegoat is gone, criminal networks don’t vanish. They turn on South Africans. A society with high inequality but no one else to blame will cannibalize itself.
“Zimbabwe post-2000 is the warning: when skilled people left, the economy didn’t open for locals — it collapsed for everyone.”
Migration is continental. The AU permits it. There are South African teachers in Botswana, engineers in Ghana, and executives in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire. If Accra or Lagos adopted the same logic, South Africans abroad would be expelled too. Pan-Africanism cannot be selective.
South Africans deserve jobs, safety, and dignity. But blaming other Africans misdiagnoses corruption, poor basic education outcomes, and deindustrialization. Those are governance issues, not immigration issues.
We live on one continent. What is normalized in Johannesburg will be mirrored in Accra, Lagos, and Nairobi. Be careful what you ask for. Because when there’s no foreigner left to rob, the only targets left are each other.
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About the author:
Kojo Asiamah Addo is a Social Policy & Community Development Practitioner
