Violence against migrants is indefensible. So is a regional order that allows governments to fail their people, employers to profit from desperation and South Africa to absorb the fallout.

 

When the nurse who treats you, the teacher tutoring your child, your Uber driver and the owner of the community shop all seem to be foreigners, the question in your mind is not, “How many foreigners are in the country?” It is, “Why are foreigners everywhere?”

That is the question of numbers versus visibility.

The numbers matter. South Africa’s 2022 census counted 2.4 million people born outside the country, about 3.9 per cent of the population. The United Nations’ revised estimate for 2024 is about 2.6 million, or 4.1 per cent. Nobody can state the undocumented population with confidence. Claims that South Africa is home to 10 million, 15 million or even 20 million foreigners have no credible statistical foundation. The 2022 census found that 86 per cent of South Africa’s foreign-born population came from SADC. Zimbabwe alone accounted for 45.5 per cent, followed by Mozambique, Lesotho and Malawi.

But people do not experience migration as a national percentage. They experience it at the clinic, the school gate, the taxi rank, the construction site and the spaza shop. Half of the foreign-born population counted in 2022 lived in Gauteng, with another 16 per cent in the Western Cape. Immigrant men were particularly visible in wholesale and retail trade and construction. A national minority can therefore feel like a neighbourhood majority.

Visibility is not proof of scale. But a person struggling to find work or waiting at an overcrowded clinic does not live inside a spreadsheet. Any serious conversation must begin by recognising both truths.

Much of this visibility comes not only from the jobs migrants occupy but also from the businesses they operate. Migrant-run spaza shops, salons, repair services and other small enterprises place foreign nationals in direct and daily contact with the communities they serve. Their apparent success can therefore sharpen a difficult but legitimate question: if these opportunities exist, why have more local citizens not entered the same businesses, survived and prospered? The question deserves a serious answer.

Part of the answer lies in the long injury of apartheid, which denied black South Africans access to capital, commercial property, supply networks and business education. Another part lies in the structure of the economy they inherited. South Africa has one of the continent’s most sophisticated, formalised and globally integrated economies. Yet its concentration in large companies, established supply chains and regulated markets can make it difficult for ordinary people to enter business, learn through small-scale trading, accumulate capital and gradually move into the formal economy. In many other African countries, the informal economy is not a marginal economy. It is the main economy. It is where people acquire commercial instincts, test ideas, build networks, survive failure without serious adverse credit rating implications and learn how to turn modest opportunities into scalable businesses. Migrants shaped by such environments may therefore arrive with experience of informal entrepreneurship that many black South Africans were historically denied.

Another part of the answer lies in the harsh conditions under which many migrants operate. What appears to be a business advantage may, in fact, be the discipline of desperation. With no safety net and few alternatives, a migrant entrepreneur may work longer hours, accept smaller margins and endure risks and living conditions that no person should have to accept. The two are therefore not always competing on equal terms.

And sometimes, too, the migrant behind the counter, at the spaza shop, is not who the occupation suggests. The Ethiopian spaza shop owner may be a professor of economics whose country could not put his knowledge to use. The Ghanaian salon owner may have run a successful enterprise before an unfavourable business environment pushed her out. The Zimbabwean gardener may once have managed restaurants before his economy collapsed. The Nigerian tour operator may hold multiple master’s degrees in tourism and related fields yet have had to seek in South Africa the opportunities denied at home. Crossing a border may have changed their occupations, but it did not erase their education, experience or commercial judgement. Knowledge of pricing, procurement, stock control, customer service, staffing and cash flow can be transferred to even the smallest enterprise. What appears to be competition between two ordinary shopkeepers may therefore be competition between an experienced professional or entrepreneur rebuilding from the bottom and a local entrant learning business for the first time after generations of economic exclusion. The migrant’s hidden experience becomes an advantage, while the local person’s historical exclusion remains a disadvantage.

These are composite illustrations, but they point to a wider continental contradiction. The abilities that may give migrants an advantage in South Africa are the same abilities their countries of origin failed to retain, recognise or use. Africa is haemorrhaging human capacity, and the waste often continues after skilled people cross a border. Their qualifications may go unrecognised, while their legal status, language barriers and discrimination shut them out of work that matches their training. Desperation then drives them into jobs far below their abilities. The continent educates people at public and family expense, then wastes their knowledge in a prolonged struggle for survival.

This is where continental failure meets local resentment. Displaced talent does not arrive in South Africa as an abstract development loss. It appears behind the counter of a township shop, in a contested job, in an overcrowded neighbourhood or at an already burdened public facility. That concentration neither causes nor justifies hostility. It does, however, help explain why anger falls most readily on poorer migrants who compete with struggling South Africans in the same strained economic spaces. The hostility is xenophobic and, in its dominant pattern, Afrophobic.

Yet even Afrophobia does not fully explain the selectivity of the anger. If this were simply hostility towards Africans or citizens of SADC countries, it would be expressed more evenly. It is not. The public fury is rarely directed with the same intensity towards other Africans from the region, say people from Mauritius, Botswana, Namibia or Angola. It falls most heavily on poorer Africans from countries whose citizens arrive in larger numbers, settle in working-class communities and enter the most strained and competitive parts of the economy. The hostility is therefore not only racialised. It is also classed as geographically concentrated and shaped by the unequal distribution of state failure across the region.

This matters because it suggests that what is unfolding cannot be explained simply as hatred of Africans or even as hostility towards citizens of SADC countries. The most visible targets tend to be visitors from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, countries whose political failures, economic collapse or prolonged insecurity have pushed large numbers of their citizens into South Africa’s township economy and working-class communities and the most strained economic spaces. By contrast, citizens of more stable countries in the region are often perceived as people who visit, study, invest or conduct business and then return to functioning countries they can still call home.

These movements do not have one cause. Lesotho’s labour has been tied to South Africa for generations. Mozambique carries the legacies of regional labour migration, conflict, poverty and climate shocks. Malawi’s workers confront low wages and limited opportunity. Zimbabwe’s political and economic decline changed the scale and desperation of a movement that long predated the crisis. The DRC bears conflict of another order.

Still, these countries share a hard truth. When governments destroy economies, suppress enterprise, reward families and cronies, or allow institutions to collapse, they do not keep the consequences within their borders. They export unemployment, displaced talent and human desperation. The elites who ruined the country move their money. The people who suffer move themselves.

What many South Africans are confronting, therefore, is the regional consequence of leaders who can destroy institutions, loot national economies, move some of that wealth into South Africa, and then push the people for whom they are responsible across the border, effectively transferring the human and economic costs of their failures to neighbouring countries.

The tragedy is that this anger is directed at the migrants who are themselves victims of failures. The poor are made to fight the displaced, while those who impoverished both continue to move their money, protect their interests and escape accountability.

South Africa becomes the regional shock absorber.

When only one member of a family is responsible for everyone’s school fees, hospital bills and emergencies, the cost of rising becomes extremely high for the whole family, including that one working member. Africa can only survive, stand together and thrive if all its member countries are playing their part.

That does not absolve South Africa. As a regional powerhouse and one of the continental anchor countries, that comes with responsibility. However, South Africa is not a rich country. It is a country of rich people and businesses.

Its official unemployment rate reached 33.6 per cent in the second quarter of 2026. Its municipalities fail citizens. Its borders and immigration system have been weakened by poor administration and corruption. Its employers sometimes hire undocumented workers precisely because they are easier to underpay, overwork and silence.

In such a country, cheap labour is gold.

Recent events exposed the bargain. After anti-migrant protests drove workers from clothing factories in Newcastle, some employers struggled to fill sewing jobs. Factory owners spoke of scarce skills and South Africans unwilling to take the work. Labour representatives pointed instead to low pay, poor conditions and reported minimum-wage violations. The vacancies did not prove that migrants had stolen jobs. They exposed a labour model that depended on workers having too little power to refuse bad terms.

This is the political economy of scapegoating. Employers capture the benefit of vulnerable labour. Citizens and migrants bear the pressure. Political actors then harvest the anger. No conspiracy is needed. The incentives are plain.

Take, for example, the case of Zimbabwe. Unconfirmed reports suggested that some South African politicians and businesspeople worked for, waited for and watched Zimbabwe crumble because the result was highly skilled labour at a fraction of the price, often without the power to insist on protection against abuse and exploitation.

Across our borders, these comrades in political and business leadership are comrades in cheques and real estate. They have deceived poor Africans into becoming foot soldiers against one another.

This could have been an African Lives Matter moment. Imagine if ordinary people across the Limpopo had built solidarity before Zimbabwe’s collapse drove so many people south. Imagine if workers had confronted the governments and employers producing displacement, wage exploitation and joblessness on both sides of the border. Such solidarity could restore dignity across the border and back home.

Of course, it is unreasonable to expect an unemployed resident of Soweto, Alexandra or Newcastle to hold Harare, Maputo, Maseru or Lilongwe to account. The legitimate claim South Africans can press is against their own state.

We foreign nationals must also look beyond the immediate hate and confront the failures at home that drove us across the border. Why are our governments quick to express outrage after an attack and pay for repatriation, yet unwilling to support a gifted student offered tuition-free education abroad? Why do they ignore graduates who accumulate qualifications without finding work, while jobs and contracts go to ruling families and cronies? When desperation forces one of those graduates to set aside their degrees, cross a border and open a barbershop in Soweto, why does their government recognise them only after they are attacked?

Our governments cannot outsource their duties to South Africa and then present themselves as our defenders when the consequences become violent.

Just imagine if Africa’s professors, professionals, artisans and entrepreneurs who are collecting rubbish, cleaning homes, guarding gates and tending gardens for survival here and in other countries could use their full abilities back home. How many institutions of the calibre of the universities of Pretoria, Cape Town and Stellenbosch might rise across the continent? How many farms, factories, technologies and great businesses would thrive? How much faster would African economies grow?

And how much easier would it be to unify Africa and build a genuine single market if every country contributed its productive capacity, safety, and opportunity? No union can endure if one society believes it exports goods, capital and services but receives the region’s economic and social crises in return. The answer is not closed borders. It is more functioning countries.

People move even from the Scandinavian countries. Movement is good for the human race. It spreads knowledge, builds families, carries ideas, and connects markets. But movement should be a choice, an informed choice. An African should be free to leave home in pursuit of opportunity, not forced to escape it in pursuit of survival.

The bigotry and self-destructive behaviour on some South African streets should revolt every decent heart. None of this softens the moral judgement on violence. There is no love in a beating, no solidarity in denying a sick person treatment and no justice in looting a shop because of its owner’s birthplace. South Africans must reject Afrophobia and vigilantism without being told that every concern about migration is imaginary or hateful.

To look beyond the hate is not to excuse it. It is to see the system that keeps turning Africa’s poor against Africa’s displaced while failed governments, abusive employers and opportunistic politicians escape scrutiny. Every African government must build a country where its people are free to leave but are not forced to flee.

South Africa’s streets are sounding an alarm for the continent. Africa should answer it before another protest ends in another funeral.

 

About Integrate Africa Advisory Services

Integrate Africa Advisory Services is a pan-African advisory firm that helps governments, African institutions, and international partners navigate the political, regulatory, and strategic realities of African integration. Based in Johannesburg, we combine high-level African policy, diplomatic, and geopolitical expertise to deliver actionable advice on AU systems, peace and security, governance, economic integration, and institutional engagement.

Author

Dr Remember Miamingi is a co-founder and CEO of Integrate Africa Advisory Services and a former advisor within the Political Affairs, Peace and Security Department of the African Union. Dr Miamingi is a graduate of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria, and holds a Master of Laws and Doctor of Laws Degree from the University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa.