‘This will not be tolerated.’ These words have to be among the most common of declarations from incumbent politicians to their followers. It communicates a stern sense of authority, that those in power will act resolutely against some form of (deviant) behaviour and show neither leniency nor understanding to those who engage in it. This is no mere prohibition, but a line in the sand that defines the bounds of what is morally and ethically acceptable. It is the rhetorical equivalent of a threatening wag of the finger by a family patriarch whose goodwill had been abused and whose patience has now come to an end.
And according to President Ramaphosa – an element of whose public persona has consciously been crafted around the idea of him as national head-of-family, the genial, fatherly Oom Cyril – something that will not be tolerated is xenophobia and the violence that accompanies it.
In his latest Monday morning letter to the nation, the President rightly bemoaned the surge in public harassment of ‘foreign nationals’ in South Africa. Impromptu inspections of shops owned by migrants, demands to see the staff registers and papers of restaurants and the lethal street justice meted out by vigilantes were impermissible.
‘We are a democracy founded on the rule of law,’ he wrote, ‘Acts of lawlessness directed at foreign nationals, whether they are documented or undocumented, cannot be tolerated.’
Whether or not they ‘cannot’ (perhaps that should be ‘should not’) be tolerated, such actions most certainly are.
The 2007 Country Review Report on South Africa, produced by the African Peer Review Mechanism, pointed out that ‘high levels of xenophobic tendencies, especially against foreigners from other African countries, exist’, and described this as one of the country’s key challenges. The government’s response to this was to deny it (these comments are appended at the back of the report). The following year, South Africa was convulsed by xenophobic rioting, which left 62 people dead.
Polling in recent years suggests that South Africans take a rather dim view of foreigners. A Pew Research poll from 2018 found that upwards of 60% of South Africans believed that foreigners put undue stress on welfare and work opportunities; that they increased the risk of terrorism; and were more inclined towards crime than South Africans. An Afrobarometer poll found that in 2021, a little under one in three South Africans would not like to have foreign workers or immigrants living in their neighbourhoods.
Whether South Africa as a whole is a ‘xenophobic society’ is a matter of interpretation. But it’s beyond question that xenophobia constitutes a sinister undercurrent in our political culture. Prior to the advent of democracy, it was less visible and sparingly discussed; since the 1990s, it has become a regular feature of our public life.
And there is no shortage of political entrepreneurs ready to tap into it, as we have seen. That’s enough to encourage its toleration.
Though let it not be ignored or forgotten that the President’s own party and his government have not been above doing so themselves. Hence the remarks of one-time cabinet minister Nomvula Mokonyane: ‘Our townships cannot be a site of subtle takeover and build-up for other situations we have seen in other countries. I am ready to state my view formally in defence of our communities.’
Or those of erstwhile finance minister Tito Mboweni: ‘The proportion of South Africans working in a restaurant must be greater than that of non-South Africans.’
Meanwhile, the Employment Services Amendment Bill is laying the groundwork for quotas on foreign workers. The Draft National Labour Migration Policy for South Africa justifies quotas as being set ‘to limit the number of foreign nationals from competing for the few technical and low skilled jobs available.’ Or as the Minister of Employment and Labour put it, it would assist in ‘addressing South Africans’ expectations regarding access to work opportunities, given worsening unemployment and the perception that foreign nationals are distorting labour market access.’ Similar restrictions are under consideration for small businesses, apparently to bar foreigners from operating in particular sectors.
It’s a somewhat more sophisticated version of ‘they’re taking our jobs’, but conceptually not hugely different. If any inspectors are going to be scrutinising employee rolls and calculating the ratio of Zimbabweans to South Africans among the wait-staff of Tshwane eateries they will be government officials in ill-fitting suits, not politicians in red T-shirts – but those inspections will be undertaken.
Still, the president’s concern is less about attitudes and policy – immigration and border security are, after all, entirely legitimate subjects for democratic contestation – than about the ‘lawlessness’ that grows out of it. He’s quite right on this, but paradoxically so.
President Ramaphosa correctly recognised the cloying sense of insecurity that South Africa’s people live under. (This at least is a change of pace from the official response to the APRM report’s concerns about crime, which the then government stoutly denied as a major problem.) But acting outside the law could not be tolerated.
‘Today, our anger may be directed at nationals from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria or Pakistan. Tomorrow, our anger may be directed at each other.’ A praiseworthy sentiment. Pathologies do not respect boundaries. Tolerating them seldom ends well.
And yet there are numerous illustrations of just how much even the state and its law enforcement agencies have effectively tolerated such behaviour.
Think of the trashing of H&M stores or Clicks outlets by the EFF for racially insensitive marketing (or what was perceived to be so). As far as I can ascertain, no one was arrested for the former; a few were for the latter. But this was hardly a major disincentive. During the campaign against Clicks, Julius Malema appealed to security guards and police to desist from intervening. There’s an element of chutzpah there, but unfortunately it is all of a piece with so much of what is (and has been) tolerated in South African politics – and frequently ignored by the state.
It goes back a long way. The 1994 election took place in an atmosphere of widespread political violence, and free political activity was not possible across large parts of the country. At times, this was revealingly endorsed by political figures. Dan Mofokeng, then a leader in an ANC-aligned civic organisation, declared: ‘The people will use every tactic to prevent political activity by the (white) parties. They are not going to allow these parties to come to the townships.’
Mofokeng went on to a career in Gauteng’s provincial government, his stance having done little to compromise him.
The implied sanctioning of violent behaviour – typically masked by clever words, or an appeal to an undefined ‘context’ – has run like a dark thread through our democracy. Whether these are songs extolling martial virtues, political vocabularies about ‘enemies’, ‘counter-revolution’ or ‘war’, speeches to agitated crowds during strikes, or exhortations to ‘shoot and kill’, this is a mindset that has no place in a constitutional democracy.
It also has few consequences. I am not aware of any political leader who has suffered any serious repercussions for rhetoric of this nature, be this of a political or legal nature. (The closest we’ve come have been charges under the Riotous Assemblies Act for encouraging the occupation of land.)
Nor, too often, have there been any consequences for those engaging in this behaviour. Think of strike violence: a strike by the security industry in 2006 cost 57 lives by some counts, with no prosecutions that I can find.
As it happens, Afrobarometer found that some 15% of the population had experienced politically-driven violence in their communities the past two years, with another 19% having feared but not experienced it. The South African Reconciliation Barometer probed in 2019 whether people had ‘used force or violence for a political cause.’ A minority, 8.3%, had done so. Another 14.3% said they had not but would do so if they ‘had the opportunity.’ There is, in other words, a substantial constituency for whom violence is tolerable.
More common, and more visible, have been the unspectacular, day-to-day acts of lawlessness among the country’s leadership. If there is truth to the adage that a fish rots from the head (and I believe there is) this would do much to explain what has gone amiss. Where society’s leaders tolerate something, or are seen to avoid the consequences of their malfeasance, it sets the tone for their underlings. And we’ve had that in abundance. The humming-and-hawing around Allan Boesak in the 1990s (though at least he stood trial and served time for his misdeeds). The denialism around the arms deal, a matter that remains unresolved. The hero’s send-off and light-duty prison sojourn for Tony Yengeni. The ‘trust me’ on Jackie Selebi.
The all-of-the-above for the Zuma years, which – curiously – seemed to have escaped the notice of the then deputy president. And now the farce around the ANC’s step-aside rule.
And the crippling of the state itself through the ANC’s unconstitutional and illegal programme of state capture, otherwise known as cadre deployment.
Let’s borrow the words of the Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation, in the wake of the COVID procurement scandal: ‘Corrupt leaders have been tolerated largely out of strong emotional bonds to the organisation and its group of exceptional leaders who ultimately prevailed in the long struggle against apartheid. Instead of acting against the corrupt, over the years, systems and individuals have been compromised and the State and ruling party have become increasingly factionalised.’
And when the state needed to show its mettle in July last – when ‘this will not be tolerated’ was really needed – it shrank away.
What lessons are the EFF and Operation Dudula expected to draw? The reality is that not only has their conduct been tolerated, but legitimised, both by copious precedent and by the failure of the state to act when it was called upon to do so.
The aggressive posture that South Africa evinces towards approach to migrants should concern us all. It is a moral problem in itself. It speaks to the failure of existing institutions and to the absence of workable policy. It illustrates disregard for the law that is central to the endurance of a modern society. It draws on the societal stresses that unattended socio-economic dysfunction make inevitable. And it points to the silhouette of a dark part of our political culture. This should concern us all, for just as ‘foreign nationals’ have come to signify hardships to which they did not contribute, so do other politically useful enemies: minorities, ethnic outsiders, homosexuals, farmers, each carrying their own ascribed burden of animosity.
The President is right about expressing intolerance for xenophobia and xenophobic violence. The question is whether the conduct of his own government will ultimately alleviate this condition or aggravate it further. What it has already tolerated is not encouraging.
