The Sunday Mail
Every now and then waves of xenophobia sweep across South Africa, usually in the poorest urban areas but sometimes targeting quite legal truck drivers on main roads.
We are once again seeing this, in Diepsloot, a grossly overcrowded suburb of Johannesburg founded as a transit camp in the dying days of apartheid for people moved from shanty settlements in other parts of the metropolitan area.
Despite a determined effort to create regular serviced housing stands, Diepsloot still has a lot of people living in small shacks in backyards. About 45 percent of the population live in shacks built on land subdivided from the legal plots by the registered landowners seeking to augment their incomes, often to build or extend their legal houses although there is some Government support. These are besides shacks built in the remaining yards.
Poverty is serious, both among the South Africans resorting to shacks and among the many foreigners in the area, although the foreigners do generally have an income of sorts, from part-time and often informal work and the like. Crime rates are high, as can be expected when 140 000 people are crowded onto 1 200ha, the size of standard size old white farm in Zimbabwe, in single story formal and informal dwellings, more than 100 people on each hectare, with poverty the order of the day. It makes Mbare look like a wide open space.
In other words it is a powder keg waiting to explode and now there is an explosion. What is being seen are gangs, called Dubula after the fake vigilante “operation” that has some support among the many victims of crime. As so often happens in these sort of social conditions, foreigners can be blamed for crime and are a convenient target.
Yet the main motive of the attacks appears to be robbery from the reports coming out of Diepsloot, despite what it said. Foreigners are assaulted, and one Zimbabwean, Mr Elvis Nyathi, was particularly brutally murdered, being battered by rocks and burned alive. But his widow and many others were beaten up and robbed.
The xenophobia is used to excuse the robbery, horrifying as that is. And as can happen at the base of society when people give up, the hatred can overtake the crime, which is what happened with Mr Nyathi.
Foreigners in South Africa tend to try and avoid criminal activity. Some Zimbabweans illegally in South Africa, and we need to be open about this, are our own criminals seeking sanctuary from our police but usually living on what they stole here. Others are no credit to our country.
But the vast majority are people like Mr Nyathi trying to earn a living, in his case as a gardener, and that is right at the bottom of the heap. He was doing a job a lot of South Africans so despise they will not do themselves which is why people hire an illegal immigrant, as well as the fact that they can pay the illegal less and grant no labour rights.
A lot of post-colonial Africa has gross inequality, stemming from the old racial divisions, and these are worse than most in South Africa. So you have a country that by African standards is well-off but highly unequal. That creates employment opportunities for the dirty jobs that people can do for the better off minority, and a lot of the worst of those jobs are done by the foreigners.
This explains, but can never excuse, the xenophobia. The South African Government is moving swiftly. But the main thrust is to defuse the xenophobia through a determined effort to track down the illegals, with Diepsloot being flooded with squads of immigration officers.
Appeals are being made to give these officials the names and addresses of the foreigners. This is designed to curb vigilantism, but considering what we have seen is simply likely to see South African criminals demanding protection money, to keep quiet and making the position of foreigners intolerable.
South Africa has a sovereign right to control immigration. Already this year it is making a determined effort to end the special arrangements for Zimbabweans living there, the middle group between those who have a full legal right, basically some of our best educated and most skilled people, and the illegals at the bottom. The specially admitted middle group have until the end of this year to either get the normal work permits or go home.
But neither of these top two groups live in shacks in Diepsloot. Some in that unfortunate suburb will be quietly moving out, to avoid both the gangs and the immigration officials; others will be calling it a day and coming home.
The Zimbabwean Government is obviously in contact with the South African authorities, since our citizens in South Africa, either there legally, legally but temporarily or illegally all deserve protection from criminals, and the South Africans are taking action. They have done so before, including protection for the truck drivers who quite legally and openly move the trade between the two countries.
But the solution is likely to see more rigid enforcement of immigration regulations and that will very likely mean a fair number of Zimbabweans coming home. The numbers are large, but not enormous. Political posturing converted our falling birth rates and lower population growth, a direct result of universal education and basic primary health into a flood of mythical emigrants.
There are a good number but nothing like the numbers bandied around on social media, and those highly exaggerated numbers fuel the xenophobia, since South Africans are not immune to the trash on social media any more than Zimbabweans.
So Zimbabwe will have to plan for more people coming home, and be able to aid them, and it now looks as though we need to formalise some of the guest worker arrangements that have been operating informally since democracy came to South Africa.
The highly-skilled diaspora just needs protection, the sort of protection all residents need. The rest, who do the crummy jobs, need both protection and some sort of legal status. Winking at illegals, as happens since the crummy jobs in South Africa still have to be done, is no longer a solution. And meanwhile we have to do what we can to help those being hunted by the xenophobic vigilante gangs. Our economic growth rates, far faster than South Africa’s, will eventually solve much of the problem, but we still need temporary assistance for those forced to leave South Africa.
