Xenophobic rhetoric risks escalating into organised violence

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JEREMY MAGGS: A new wave of xenophobic marches is raising alarm about political opportunism, also about growing social anger, and I think the danger of violence may be being normalised all ahead of the local government election in November.

You also would have seen the United Nations warning South Africa about growing anti-migrant sentiment.

But I think the harder question is whether government, police and political leaders are actually doing enough to stop fear from turning into organised intimidation.

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In that respect, I want to talk to Ferial Haffajee, associate editor at the Daily Maverick, who has been watching and writing extensively on the subject. Ferial, welcome, and maybe just the most obvious question is why right now do you think xenophobia is regaining some degree of momentum?

FERIAL HAFFAJEE: Hi, Jeremy. So it’s not right now. If you look at the past 20 years or so, there are quite regular and violent flare-ups.

I think what we’re seeing now is a series of political entrepreneurs, usually people who’ve started in radio, very, very charismatic figures who are looking for politics to hitch their wagons to, and they’ve come across anti-migrant sentiment or mobilisation as the easiest one to do so with.

JEREMY MAGGS: You’re suggesting then a lot more organised perhaps, than in previous times, and that is a cause for concern, really, isn’t it?

FERIAL HAFFAJEE: It’s not organic like we have seen previously. It’s actually being stoked by a few people and organisations. Operation Dudula is probably the one that’s best known.

Read: The resonance of Operation Dudula

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Another that I’ve come across with the work of the researcher Yossabel Chetty at the University of Stellenbosch is March and March, which really came to our attention around the alleged coronation of an Igbo king [in KuGompo], where March and March organised its first big and national protest.

It had been doing the same thing in KwaZulu-Natal for a few months, and that organisation or movement is of course led by Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma.

JEREMY MAGGS: Do you think the state is responding firmly enough to threats against foreign nationals?

FERIAL HAFFAJEE: Not at all. There is a very big judgment against Operation Dudula in November last year, where the judge set out the laws that should govern their work and really made very clear grounds for them being in breach of the judgment.

So it required that there should not be violence, that they should not carry weapons, that they cannot intimidate people from getting into public services, be it schools or clinics.

Those were the two big issues for the judgment. Those are ignored by law enforcement, who I think give an easy ride to these movements.

JEREMY MAGGS: Is there a degree, perhaps, of complicity, or is it simply easier to turn a blind eye?

FERIAL HAFFAJEE: I can’t say. Maybe it’s respect for our culture of protest, where all you need to do to register protest is to go to the nearest police precinct and say that there’s going to be a protest.

But what I saw in Johannesburg and in Tshwane was the municipal police really allowing quite gratuitous displays of violence. You saw many shops in both cities closed down in anticipation of violence.

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But what’s more important is to understand that the rhetoric of violence really does quickly turn into actual violence, and we’ve seen that repeatedly through many years in our country and, of course, in the rest of the world.

JEREMY MAGGS: Which I guess raises the question about where the line is or if the line has moved between legitimate concern about migration and, as we’re witnessing, outright intimidation.

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FERIAL HAFFAJEE: I think that legitimate concern about migration and how it squeezes out opportunities for locals is something that we need to think about as a country and as people who care about democracy.

But for me, that’s more about state failure and especially local state failure.

So if you make cities better places for job opportunities, if you think more carefully about how people get into our country and what happens at our borders, perhaps that’s the political solution, rather than allowing new movements, for me, to run quite rampant in cities.

It’s having implications for business.

So many of our leading blue chips, be it your MTN, be it Standard Bank, be it Vodacom, we can name them, be it MultiChoice, they are dependent on good relationships across the continent.

Our name is really mud at the moment in both Nigeria and Ghana ambassadors have been called in to express their concerns about what’s happening on South African streets. I think that business certainly needs to make its voice heard more loudly.

JEREMY MAGGS: Do you think government has lost control, then, of the migration narrative?

FERIAL HAFFAJEE: I think that if you look at the work of Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber and the Border Management Authority, they are trying to bring law and policy to intelligent migration work. Obviously, civil society would disagree with that, but I do think that’s where it starts.

It’s policy, implementing your policy and then executing it effectively. You have seen a sea change in how that is being managed.

But perhaps the pace of reform is not as fast as the pace of the disintegration of the local state, and therefore you could see a loss of control.

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JEREMY MAGGS: So we might not have the right policy then?

FERIAL HAFFAJEE: No, I think you’re beginning to see the development of the correct policies, give or take, because there will always be people who say migration policy and its evolution is wrong.

But you are beginning to see the development of the right policy, some improvement in practice with the Border Management Authority.

The announcement last week that eight ports are going to be run in much more modern practice. When you do that, you begin to deal with the corruption at your ports of entry.

So that’s happening. But I think the execution in the cities may not be at the level where you require it yet.

JEREMY MAGGS: And just a final one, is this going to become a big local government election issue, do you think?

FERIAL HAFFAJEE: It’s a huge issue. Right now, it’s one of the drivers. The anti-migrant message is how many political parties are staging their manifestos.

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It may well be their informal manifesto because at a formal level you would require water, electricity, transport, jobs to be your big-ticket items. But they are messaging around anti-migrancy as a populist manifesto big time.

JEREMY MAGGS: Thank you very much indeed. Ferial Haffajee, associate editor at the Daily Maverick.

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