South Africa’s Xenophobia Crisis: The Government Is Complicit in This Attack on African Migrants, One History Will Remember

OPINION

As xenophobia surges toward the 30 June deadline, the real scandal is South Africa’s government complicity: a state failing its constitutional duty to protect African migrants, and a history that will remember the choice.

By the Migrants Movement

On the 24th of June, in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, a non-profit organisation called the Migrants Movement met with more than twenty individuals representing the country’s larger migrant community networks. The meeting was not called to mobilise people or to stage a protest, as that has never been how the Migrants Movement conducts its work. It was called to listen: to understand the predicaments facing this extensive network of African nationals, and to continue the work of the Movement of documenting and reporting anti-migrant narratives online, dismantling the networks that organise hate, and exposing the groups whose crimes are so often used to tarnish the image of migrants in the country.

What that room described was not abstract grievance. It was the lived texture of South Africa’s deepening xenophobia and of a government whose complicity is no longer deniable. There is a particular kind of violence that does not need to lift its own hand. It only needs to look away at the right moment, to call a mob a “concerned community,” to let a deadline hang over millions of people like a blade, and to dress its silence up as neutrality. This is the violence the South African state is currently committing against African migrants. And let us be clear about what it is: not a failure of capacity, but a choice. History remembers choices.

A manufactured target

For more than a year now, groups like Operation Dudula and March and March have marched through Johannesburg, Durban and the townships in between, stopping people in the street to demand their papers, barring foreign nationals and their children from clinics and schools, forcing shops to close, and “auditing” hospitals as though citizenship were a condition of being treated for a wound. They have set 30 June as the day undocumented migrants must be gone. As that date approaches, the harassment has not cooled. It has intensified. And the people being hunted are overwhelmingly fellow Africans; Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Malawians, Basotho, who make up under four percent of this country’s population and who carry the blame for a national crisis they did not cause.

The defenders of this campaign will tell you it is about crime, about jobs, about strained hospitals. Those grievances are real. South Africans are right to be angry about unemployment, about collapsing services, about a state that has failed them for thirty years. But that is precisely the sleight of hand. The frustration is genuine; the target is manufactured. It is far easier to point a crowd at a Malawian street vendor than at the corruption, the looted budgets and the administrative rot that actually hollowed out the clinics. The migrant is not the cause of the crisis. The migrant is the alibi for the people who are.

What the court found about government complicity

And where is the government in all this? It is standing exactly where it has chosen to stand: in the way of its own duty.

In November 2025, the Johannesburg High Court handed down a judgment that should be read aloud in every constituency office in the country. Judge Leicester Adams found Operation Dudula’s conduct unlawful and unconstitutional, interdicted the group from demanding people’s documents and from harassing, evicting or inciting hatred against foreign nationals. But he did not stop at the vigilantes. He turned to the state itself and found that the government’s failure to implement its own National Action Plan to Combat Racism, Racial Discrimination and Xenophobia amounted to an unconstitutional violation of its duties. The plan exists. The legal obligation exists. The state simply did not act. A court had to order the government to do the thing the Constitution already required it to do.

It is true that the same court did not find proof that the police and Home Affairs were actively colluding with these groups. Fine. Let us grant the most generous reading possible. But complicity does not always wear a uniform and march in step. Complicity is also the officer who watches a Cameroonian man get struck over the head during a march and reports that the gathering was “peaceful.” It is the police service that human rights organisations have repeatedly accused of standing by while armed men “verify” the nationality of strangers on a public street. It is a state that, when the moment came to choose between protecting the vulnerable and appeasing the mob, kept choosing the mob by doing nothing. There is a word for a government that holds the power to stop a harm, is legally bound to stop it, and declines. The word is complicit.

When xenophobia gets the state’s blessing

Then there is the rhetoric, which is worse than the silence, because it is active. In June, with the vigilante deadline bearing down and fear thick in the air, the President’s chosen message to the nation was not protection. It was that the state would intensify the identification and deportation of undocumented foreigners. He added that South Africans are “not xenophobic.” But you cannot announce a crackdown in the same breath that mobs are demanding one and pretend the two are unrelated. When the highest office in the land answers a wave of xenophobic intimidation by promising more enforcement against the very people being intimidated, it does not calm the mob. It blesses it. It tells every man with a holstered firearm at a march that the state shares his goal and differs only on method.

The history South Africa will have to answer for

This is the part history will not forgive, because South Africa, of all nations, knows better. This is the country that hosted the world’s conference against racism and xenophobia in 2001. This is the country whose own liberation was carried, sheltered and funded by the very nations whose citizens are now being chased out of clinics. Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe — they took in South African exiles when South Africa was a crime to be. The Constitution that the world held up as a miracle guarantees healthcare to everyone within these borders, full stop, no nationality clause. “Ubuntu” was not meant to be a tourism slogan. It was meant to be a law of the heart: I am because you are. A government presiding over the inversion of all of that, over children turned away from school gates because of where their parents were born — is not a bystander to history. It is writing the chapter that its grandchildren will be ashamed to read.

None of this requires hating South Africans, or pretending the country’s pain is not real, or waving away every concern about borders and crime. Borders can be managed lawfully. Crime can be fought by name, criminal by criminal, with the courts and the police doing their actual jobs. No serious person disputes that. What cannot be defended is collective punishment, millions treated as less than human because of the conduct of a few, and a state that facilitates it through abdication and inflames it through rhetoric.

The 30th of June will come. The marches will either be met by a government that finally remembers its constitutional spine, or by one that lets the deadline do its quiet work and calls the result order. We will all see which it chooses. And so will history.

The Migrants Movement is a non-profit organisation that documents and reports anti-migrant narratives, works to dismantle organised hate networks, and defends the rights of African nationals living in South Africa. To email the author, sent to info@migrantsmovement.co.za