KENNETH MOKGATLHE | Blaming foreign nationals pure political sloganeering

The African migrants who have come to regard SA as their new home due to the political and economic quagmire of their own countries are not feeling safe due to regular conflicts between them and indigenous South Africans.

It is worse when elections are approaching as we begin to see politicians exploiting Afrophobia as a tool to appeal to disillusioned South Africans. God knows Musambo*, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, was refused entry at the local primary school in Zeerust, North West.

She is an eleven-year-old whose parents fled the conflict-ridden North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to SA in 1996. Her mother runs a small restaurant while her father works as a petrol attendant.  SA has become home for them.

God knows and 12 other kids from the Congolese community in Zeerust were rejoicing to start their academic life on January 18. Their parents were told to go back home as residents did not want to share facilities with them.

The parents were shattered, what option do they have? Their business is in Zeerust, that is where they have lived their adult life and their kids are South African, they were born here.

As a freelance journalist, I wrote two stories on the rising tensions between the locals and Congolese. I was accused of siding with the Congolese, though I established that SA drug dealers in Zeerust were behind the violent attacks. These Afrophobic attacks keep rearing their ugly heads.

The Congolese claim these tensions intensify whenever elections are approaching when politicians blame foreigners for the unemployment and hunger of locals for narrow political ends.

The Congolese community in Zeerust own and work in fast-food shops and salons. Last year they were forced to close down their barber shops for more than a month. Residents did not start their own hair salons.

There is a well-consolidated and popular narrative that African migrants are “stealing jobs” from locals and selling drugs to the country’s lost youth. We have to learn and relearn to be people with ubuntu (African humanism).

We do not want to take charge and responsibility for our failures, however, we want to shift blame to people who don’t even have a bearing on our presence or future. Our economic misfortunes cannot be blamed on foreign nationals, it is pure propaganda slogans by politicians who are running SA into the ground.

In 2007 when I was in high school I was taught by more than four teachers from Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana in Zeerust. When I did my junior university degree I was taught by lecturers from Zambia, China, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

Wetend to focus on the negative aspects of so-called foreigners. Why are we not talking about the positive contribution above? Security agents on the borders should play their role of making sure that people who enter and exit SA are authorised to do so.

Once inside SA lawfully, it is the work of the police to ensure that every one of us obeys the laws. The law is the law, period. Foreign nationals are not the reason one is not working. Foreign nationals are not stealing money from the public purse.

*Not her real name

■ Mokgatlhe is a columnist and political writer