Story audio is generated using AI
I know what it feels like to be singled out as a foreigner.
In October 2022, landing from Nairobi at OR Tambo, an immigration officer decided, before even scanning my passport, that I was too dark to be South African.
I allowed her to walk me to the interrogation room so I could experience what it’s like to be a “foreigner”. When she said to her colleagues in isiZulu, “Deal with this one”, I intervened. In a mix of isiZulu, Setswana and English, I assertively told her she should go back to her booth and let me into my country. She realised that I am indeed South African — especially when her senior recognised me. He asked me not to report her as she was a single mother.
Former finance minister Tito Mboweni’s son, Tumelo, then 24, was similarly detained and roughed up by police in a minibus in Sandton in 2013 and threatened with deportation because he “looked like a foreigner” — he was “too dark” to be South African.
What is happening here — the violence, the intimidation, the rogue removals of legal and illegal foreigners alike — is unacceptable
We got off lightly. Especially compared to foreigners, legal or otherwise. We got off better than Emmanuel Sithole, the Mozambican national stabbed to death in Alexandra during an April 2015 attacks. We were not among the hundreds of Ghanaians and Nigerians hurriedly evacuated on emergency flights during the latest wave of protests. We are not among the Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Congolese, Nigerians, Ethiopians and Somalis who found themselves behind the 3m security fence at Lindela, South Africa’s deportation centre in Krugersdorp.
What is happening here — the violence, the intimidation, the rogue removals of legal and illegal foreigners alike — is unacceptable.
South Africans deserve secure borders, functioning immigration systems, safe communities and economic opportunities, and fellow Africans deserve dignity, lawful treatment and protection from violence.
This state is clearly a crime scene. On February 23 South Africa’s Special Investigating Unit revealed how the country’s immigration system had been treated as a marketplace where permits and visas were sold to the highest, and even lowest, bidder. As acting SIU head Leonard Lekgetho said, South Africa was being sold, one permit at a time, for as little as R500.
This is the root of the migration crisis. Not an undocumented Zimbabwean crossing Beitbridge. Not Mozambicans digging as illegal zama zamas in the North West. Not the Ghanaian shopkeeper in Estcourt whose keys a local mayor, in contempt of the law, seized and handed to South African traders. The state is not the solution to lawlessness. It is its architect.
When a government sells the borders it later claims to defend, it has no moral authority to condemn those who cross them.
When the state behaves lawlessly, it produces a lawless society. Operation Dudula and March on March emerged from a normalised absence of consequence.
When Emmanuel Sithole was killed in 2015 and two Nigerian nationals were killed in April 2026, when 130 citizens were repatriated, when six African governments issued formal travel warnings and Ghana petitioned the AU to place the crisis on the agenda of its June summit, these represented the bill arriving for decades of deferred governance, in South Africa and beyond.
The Somali shopkeeper in Thembisa does not own the malls and factories. The Zimbabwean waiter does not own a restaurant chain. The Mozambican miner does not own the mining conglomerates that export critical minerals.
It’s unacceptable and unsustainable that 30 years after “independence” white South Africans, who constitute about 7.2% of the population, still own up to 72% of agricultural land and a comparable share of JSE-listed stocks. It’s unacceptable that droves of Chinese, Pakistani and European illegal immigrants operate with impunity.
This is not xenophobia. It’s Afrophobia.
The African migrant did not build that architecture. He is a fellow victim of the same failed system.
Attacking a fellow African has never created a single job, built a single school, or delivered a functioning clinic.
On June 7 President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged failures in migration management, corruption within the immigration system, mounting public frustration over unemployment and pressure on services. He announced dedicated immigration courts, accelerated deportations, phased relocation of refugee reception centres to border posts, and intensified workplace inspections.
This is not South Africa’s crisis; it is Africa’s. The same failure of governance that produced a corrupt immigration marketplace in Pretoria produced the civil war in Khartoum, the famine in Darfur, the displacement crisis in Ethiopia, and the 13 coups in five years
That is the right thing to say. It is also, for those who have watched this pattern since 2008, a promise that must now be matched by delivery.
Deliver on the infrastructure promises. Repair the immigration ecosystem from within. Enforce the law against employers who exploit undocumented workers.
On Africa Day, May 25, I was in Addis Ababa again. Together with a Kenyan friend, Mwihaki Wachira, we wandered into one of the many jewellery stores near the Piazza. No bulletproof glass. No armed guards. Mwihaki asked the owner: “Are you not worried about security?” The owner barely looked up. “That’s the government’s job,” she said. “I’m here to earn a living for my children.”
That is an entire philosophy of the state.
South Africa is not unique. It is merely the latest and loudest expression of a continental pattern.
In 1969 Ghana expelled about 200,000 Nigerian migrants. In 1983, Nigeria expelled 2-million undocumented workers, most of them Ghanaian. In Ivory Coast, locals excluded northerners and descendants of immigrants from political life, which culminated in civil war. There have been 13 coups in the past five years.
Each time, the pattern is the same: a government fails its citizens, the citizens move, the receiving country eventually turns on the arrivals.
When the AU convenes at El Alamein, Egypt, in June, it will have South Africa’s crisis on the agenda. But censuring South Africa and moving on would be treating the visible symptom while leaving the wound open.
Sudan is, for the third consecutive year, undergoing the world’s largest internal displacement crisis. Conflict and violence displaced 9.1-million people in 2025 alone. Ethiopia identified 3.3-million internally displaced persons as recently as 2024. The DRC displaced 9.7-million of its own people in 2025. Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 17.3-million of the world’s 32.3-million displacements last year.
These are not statistics. They are the explanation for why Africans move.
The AU was built to make this unnecessary. Not to manage the movement of desperate people after the fact, but to build the conditions in which Africans have reasons to stay home. Agenda 2063 promises a continent of prosperity, integration and free movement underpinned by security and good governance.
This is not South Africa’s crisis; it is Africa’s.
The same failure of governance that produced a corrupt immigration marketplace in Pretoria produced the civil war in Khartoum, the famine in Darfur, the displacement crisis in Ethiopia, and the 13 coups in five years.
That cycle must end in El Alamein
What is required now is a continent-wide migration framework with binding obligations, timelines and consequences. After 63 years, it is the minimum expectation from the AU.
The AU has one more chance, in El Alamein, to demonstrate that it is a governing institution and not merely a gathering of governments.
South Africa must deliver on its promises. But the larger reckoning belongs to the AU.
The African people have been patient enough.
- Ikalafeng is founder and chair of Brand Africa, chancellor of Sol Plaatje University and a bestselling author
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.