Afrophobia in burning trucks will have consequences for SA

“When we demand that the government #PutSouthAfricansFirst, it is not xenophobia, it is prioritising citizens.”

The ugly xenophobic side of South Africans has again resurfaced. People are coming up with slogans like these to justify the current campaign that is under way to “clean up” SA and get foreign nationals to leave the country. Sadly, pure hatred and prejudice often underline these efforts disguised as patriotism.

Economic hard times have always given space to opportunists who come in and seek to convince the poorest of the poor that their dire financial circumstances are because “foreigners have taken your jobs”.

There are foreign nationals that do unskilled work such as serving restaurant tables and manual labour in construction, but it is deception of the highest order to suggest that SA’s 30.8% unemployment rate is going to be solved by unleashing hate and violence on foreign nationals.

The opportunistic nature of the hatred disguised as patriotism becomes all too clear in that the focus has always been on foreign nationals of African descent only: Nigerians, Ghanaians, Mozambicans, the Congolese and Zimbabweans. Poor people are incited to take to the streets to clean up Africans, but the campaign is never directed at people from America, Europe or Asia, essentially making this problem one of “Afrophobia”, not the more widely used xenophobia.

The current spate of attacks on trucks and truck drivers supposedly aimed at ridding the trucking industry of foreign truck drivers has had very little response from government.

KwaZulu-Natal premier Sihle Zikalala is the only ruling party leader who has placed himself in the middle of the crisis in his province by engaging the trucking and logistics industry. Although his efforts are a good sign, his utterance such as “we will intensify [our] efforts to remove illegal immigrants” have also been quite populist and could actually fuel the violent campaign against foreign nationals. It feeds into the lawlessness that accompanies Afrophobia.

SA’s problem of porous borders must not and cannot be solved on the streets of Durban and Joburg by threatening foreign hawkers, or looting spaza shops belonging to a Somali national.

The best South Africans can do for themselves is to hold the ruling party accountable for their lack of service delivery. That service delivery must include an efficient home affairs department that takes border control seriously.

In tough economic times, it is actually in the ruling party’s interests to have something take attention away from its internal problems, such as the looting of Covid-19 relief funds and its perpetual corruption issues.

It is the same navel-gazing that they engaged in during the lockdown, when organised scrap metal gangs stole almost all of Gauteng’s rail network.

The short-sightedness of wanting to resolve a problem with unemployment by torching a truck carrying goods to a business is astounding. Aside from the damage to the truck, the entire value chain is affected: the truck driver loses his job, a company never receives its goods and another job is on the line. Which trucks will the locals be hired to drive when they’re all going up in smoke?

“If people feel South Africa is xenophobic then they must just leave,” they fume on social media, but that person wants a South African truck, carrying South African goods to travel safely through the rest of the continent.

There are going to be consequences to South Africa’s short-sightedness in dealing with fellow Africans and, sadly, our economy will emerge on the losing side.

Sydney Majoko.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.