Economic despair is fuelling hostility towards foreign nationals – Pityana

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JEREMY MAGGS: Anti-migrant violence in South Africa has left people dead, property destroyed and uncomfortable questions about a country that once depended on African solidarity in its struggle against apartheid. Speaking at the Africa and African Diaspora Conference, veteran anti-apartheid activist and human rights champion Dr Barney Pityana condemned growing hostility towards foreign nationals and warned that the world was watching in silence.

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But why has xenophobia become so deeply entrenched in society and who should be held accountable? Dr Barney Pityana, a very warm welcome to you, and do you think this country has become a fundamentally xenophobic society, or are we just mistaking economic desperation for prejudice?

BARNEY PITYANA: Thank you for that, Jeremy. No, I don’t think that we’re a very fundamentally xenophobic country or xenophobic people or even Afrophobic people. There are things that we need to realise, one, there is a wave sweeping the world today that provides both pushes and pulls for people to migrate and to move. At one level, it is a wave of hostility to people of colour, wherever they are, however desperate they may be. They are the people who die on ships in the Mediterranean, and they never get to their destinations. They just want to get away from where they are.

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The second thing is that, in Africa, there’s been an emergence of political and economic systems that that just have not served the needs of their own people.

So at the time, South Africa was considered a performing economy. So, many people came to South Africa, found their way into South Africa. The legal system in South Africa was just not actually implementing the law, and people found themselves in South Africa over a very long time. These are economic migrants, by the way, I’m not talking about refugees.

I think as far as refugees are concerned, we need to make at the point that we have an obligation to receive those who are actually running away from their own countries because of fear of death or persecution or whatever, and that we must uphold. Our courts have upheld that admirably.

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The issue in this country is really about economic migrants. Because South Africa’s economy has not been performing in the last probably 10 to 15 years and has really been going down, there’s a phenomenon of an economy that is actually not progressing in any manner whatsoever.

So unemployment at this point is very, very high. But the mistake many of these people are making is to think that if you remove the so-called migrants, unlawful as they may be, then the jobs will just emerge. That is definitely not the case.

What is even more worrying is it’s unlike us as South Africans to be so hostile and violent to people because the entirety of this country has been shaped and formed by the integration of many peoples, many languages, many colours, over a long, long, long, time. Having been a refugee myself in various countries – in my case, have been out of the country as a refugee for 15 years – having been a refugee, I do not buy the argument, I don’t think it helps to say, oh, South Africans were refugees and therefore the people are entitled to come to [the country].

That’s not the point. The point is that when people are in need, there must be mechanisms within the country to receive them, to offer hospitality, and to assist in every way possible. That is ubuntu, that is humane.

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JEREMY MAGGS: Let’s get to those mechanisms in just a moment. But I wonder whether movements such as March and March are exploiting public frustration or expressing grievances that mainstream politics refuses to confront.

BARNEY PITYANA: You’re quite correct. That is true. It’s because they know, and I agree, that mainstream politics are not confronting the deteriorating nature of our economy and what can and should be done to improve the economic well-being of ordinary people in South Africa. This country, I lived in New Brighton in a township, that’s where I was born and that’s where I grew up. There have always been people from other countries throughout the apartheid years who came from what we now call Zimbabwe and from Nyasaland, from what we now call Tanzania.

They lived as our neighbours over a very long time and there never was an issue, I think partly because, let’s leave aside the politics of the National Party apartheid system and just simply say that, because the people could find work and they had neighbours, we didn’t bother where the people came from.

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JEREMY MAGGS: Dr Pityana, you’ve criticised the silence of religious institutions. Do you think the moral authority of the church has fundamentally collapsed?

BARNEY PITYANA: I do. There’s a big problem there that the church, as I said at a World Council of Churches sponsored session, where the leaders of the World Council of Churches were present, that the silence is deafening. I used to serve as the director for the Programme to Combat Racism at the World Council of Churches for five years, and we were the voice all over the world that stood for justice and racial equality, wherever emerged the ugly head of pessimism and oppression of people by reason of race or gender or colour. We had a voice.

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I’m glad to say that the general secretary of the World Council of Churches, Dr Jerry Pillay, who is a South African academic, Dr Jerry Pillay said to me afterwards, we heard you and we are actually addressing those issues and we do believe that we need to get back. In Dr Pillay’s own speech at the conference, it was very resilient. It was really saying that this is an issue for the world today, we can no longer keep silent about it.

JEREMY MAGGS: Dr Pityana, just a final question and very briefly then, back to the mechanisms that you spoke about. Condemnation is one thing, but what concrete action then is needed in the short term that might change attitudes and stop the violence? And who needs to lead that?

BARNEY PITYANA: Firstly, I think our politics, is bad. They need a major reset. Secondly, people have lost confidence in the politics of our country. It needs a major reset. Our economy, I don’t think that the economic players, including business and industry, are really mindful of the impact of economic decisions on the life and well-being of ordinary people, and that the struggles for prosperity in the country are such that people really will do anything because it’s a way by which people are seeking a decent way of living. I think something has to be done to deal with issues of crime and crime management.

It does seem with Madlanga and Zondo that something is being done at the moment. We want to see what’s going to come out of that.

So that South Africa doesn’t become the murder and GBV (gender-based violence) capital of the world, and that the brokenness, in a speech I made at the South African Human Rights Commission a few years ago, I mentioned the brokenness of our society, the brokenness of our physical infrastructure, the brokenness of the people in our country, the brokenness of our capacity to think, and think positively about how the country and the world can be reconstructed again for the benefit of the people of our country. We lost that appetite to really rebuild and renew our country, which we had in 1994, in abundance. We’ve lost it.

JEREMY MAGGS: Dr Barney Pityana, thank you very much indeed, sir.

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