We are living in a country where most of black South Africans in particular especially in the rural areas are misinformed and gullible, not taking away anything from the rural communities as I am a rural boy myself and not because they are stupid but just because we have made it our culture not to interrogate issues or news that we hear in the media and being told by politicians. This misinformation is beneficial to the current governing, the African National Congress, because it thrives at the expense of the misinformed masses, that is why the ANC does not want to make quality education free for all and compulsory because if the majority is well educated, no one will believe the lies our people are being fed by the ANC, and means the ANC can easily loose power because their ticket to victory will be canceled through the education of the masses.

The majority of our people still believe that the ANC is the one who brought us freedom hence we are bound to vote for it regardless of the failure to deliver services and the public looting of the public purse. It’s a myth that the ANC brought us freedom! If we check history, we find that during apartheid the ANC left the country to go to exile in other countries where we are told that they were being trained to take up arms to fight the apartheid regime, that never happened, meaning they wasted many years for nothing while our people were left alone here being butchered by the apartheid regime.

The fact of the matter is that the ordinary people of this country liberated us from apartheid as they were fighting day and night with the regime, many lost their lives fighting. The likes of Steve Biko and Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela refused to leave our people and they paid the price by being brutally killed and tortured by the colonizers respectively, where was the ANC? The people of Soweto, Sharpeville and others rendered the country ungovernable, where was the ANC?

I feel pain seeing young, mostly uneducated and unemployed people saying “Viva ANC”. It was painful for me to watch Alexandra people saying they love the ANC and it is the only party they believe can change their lives for better, to my mind I asked myself if these people know that the ANC they so love has been in power for 25 years yet Alexandra which is their home is, is worse than a pigs crawl, they sleep with huge rats, their place smells sewage and they are living in squalor under the same governing party they so adore? They are praising the same ANC which stole their R1.9bn which was meant to develop and fix Alexandra under former president Thabo Mbeki.

It is high time we conscientise our voters to start thinking about the issues affecting them instead of just voting for Mandela because he is long gone and he will never come to give them a better life. Voters must start voting for:

1. Access to land

2. Free quality education and healthcare for all

3. Abolishment of private services and tenders

4. Inclusive economic participation

5. Sustainable jobs

In the past 25 years we have seen very little change. 64% of black people are living in poverty, 25% of young people are unemployed and 80% of grade four learners cannot read for meaning, which means that they are illiterate. The economy is not growing, our SOEs are constantly seeking bailouts, we are sitting at a national debt of over R3trillion and the number of black businesses is decreasing drastically. We need change and change will never come if the voters are not conscientised as they will continue to vote naturally. It is a norm for people to vote for the ANC regardless of whether they benefit from what the government must deliver to them or not.

Perhaps the best place to begin is to give a brief unpacking of a few concepts so that our conversation is founded upon sound theoretical analysis. I find this particularly important because more often than not society tends to struggle to understand its own social ills because it fails to make a proper diagnosis as to what actually creates the problems we encounter. We are a society that rushes into problem solving without diagnosis, and this sometimes tends to worsen our problems, because we administer solutions that entrench the problem, and allow the conceptual underpinnings of social ills to morph and adapt to our ever evolving socio-political strata.

One of the key complacencies of ideologically diagnosing the regressive aspects of the study of oppression or social conflict is the tired Marxist presumption that oppressive systems will inevitably self-destruct, this of course has shown itself to be a fallacy as modern capitalism for example continues to adapt itself according to the period it exists in, culturally, socially and politically. So let’s make the diagnosis, and perhaps then we can be able to administer the correct medication to what is fundamentally a degenerative society.

I have been asked today to speak on a topic that I will not lie is new to what I normally engage in, at least pointedly, but not new if one is in a constant study of what underpins systems of oppression. The politics of citizenship, sovereignty and independence are a cornerstone of modern Western philosophy and politics, and naturally are systems of organizing society that have been inherited by nations with a history of colonial conquest such as South Africa. It is feeder ideology to concepts of separationist development, which undoubtedly creates a hierarchy in global politics, in terms of power, infrastructure, wealth and development.

Africa, and ipso facto South Africa then enter this conversation of sovereignty and development in modern day society as what late Marxist scholar Samir Amin captures as peripheral societies due to underdevelopment. The relationship of Africa and its states with the rest of the world is one that is at a constant disadvantage, due to how its institutions and its social fabric have been plundered, deformed and exploited due to the slave trade and colonialism. I begin with this descriptive analysis of where Africa can be located in the world because it gives us an insight as to what informs the first theme of today’s conversation I would like to touch upon, being immigration.

Immigration in the most laymen terms is described as the process whereby one leaves their own nation for settlement in another or one foreign to that which they were born. It is phenomena which is as old as time itself, with various instances of people immigrating for political or socio-economic reasons in various moments in history. The Jewish community immigrating to the United States, France and various other nations during the Holocaust to avoid genocide, Arab natives immigrating to Britain or North African countries to avoid brutal treatment due to most notably aggressive American foreign policy. in the case of Africa, Zimbabwean nationals immigrating to South Africa due to economic instability, political repression that can be accredited to further aggressive foreign policy towards African nations that seek to undo the ills brought about by colonialism in terms of wealth distributions and pushing back against unequal trading terms, which exploit the raw material and minerals of Africa, while ensuring Africa has no independent industrial or mineral development. Immigration is an act informed by global and local political and economic contradictions wherever one looks. The question then becomes why is it that in the case of Africa, South Africa has emerged as the nation of choice for nations that suffer from economic and political strife, perhaps to give it an apt example, why is it that in Africa, South Africa has become what the United States of America is to Mexico and other Latin American countries?

To understand this one has to understand the peculiar nature of settler-colonialism in South Africa and its dispensation of negotiated settlement of 1994. South Africa, unlike its African counterparts is not a nation that struggled and attained independence in terms of what the character of a struggle for independence entails. It is a country that transitioned from an undemocratic colonial state to a democratic neo-colonial state. It is not a country where Europeans simply extracted wealth to build its empires, but one where there was settlement by the colonizer, to establish a prosperous nation of settler colonialists, at the expense of the native African. This stemmed firstly from the settlement of the Dutch in 1652, to later of the British who established a political nation state in the form of the Union of South Africa. The character of struggle in South Africa for the native was embroiled in the contradictions of statehood founded for the benefit of a white settler minority, with limited political freedoms enshrined for natives, so long as they located the native as subservient, segregated and fungible sites of exploitation. The character of struggle in South Africa in the midst of broad calls for independence in Africa was then one of a quest for various political freedoms or aspirations for such, instead of one for fundamental altering of the structural ills that were created by colonialism, such as land dispossession, alienation from identity and culture and understanding that South Africa itself as a state was established through a criminal process. This means that the foundations of modern South Africa, post 1994 are that of political freedom being given to an oppressed majority, which has been disposed of its land, wealth, culturally denigrated and stigmatised, and subjected to racialized separate development, that creates a situation where two nations exist in one.

The political state of South Africa, inherited the infrastructural development of a colonial apartheid state which was built with the blood and on the backs of native Africans, but did not alter who was in control of this infrastructure and development, leaving many Africans in the same state of subservience and on the outskirts of a stable and dignified welfare and amenities. This infrastructural development, as exploitative as it may be as natives remain fungible, recyclable sites of employment and exploitation, does place South Africa ahead of those nations that principally waged a struggle for independence and faced the consequences that imperial power imposes on those African nations that do so. South Africa maintained policy perspectives that were in favour of global international market ownership of the minerals and land within the country itself. As such, its economy was not collapsed, it has not been subject to army settlement in order to ensure “democracy is upheld” (although we all know this means to ensure the steady milking of natural resources by imperial superpowers), thus it has remained relatively politically stable, and able to build upon existing infrastructure with minimal conflict. Other African states are plagued by warfare, which is funded and sustained by foreign insurgents, poverty, political instability, collapsing economies, rife corruption and lack of welfare such as education, healthcare, housing and education. South Africa then becomes the haven for those who are faced by these contradictions in their “own” nations. South Africa, through providing these Africans with relatively “better” conditions than their own nations becomes a place of refuge, with low paying jobs, space for informal settlement and providing an opportunity to survive. It is a natural occurrence that South Africans should not be averse to, as the problems of Africa are generally the problems of black South Africans in the country, just with minimal warfare. They are problems that can be resolved through a consolidation of the mineral wealth within Africa by Africans for the sustenance of Africa, its people, and its own economies. The only reason South Africa is not in similar conditions is because a political elite, namely the ANC decided to take a different path to liberation, one that maintained good relations with those who oppressed us for political stability, while the dire material conditions of native South Africans are prolonged, with the minor benefit of being able to shit in the same toilet with white people, and squeezing a few of us into their schools and workplaces.

How then does this all correlate with xenophobia and racism? Well xenophobia is an inevitable reality when one creates separate development within an African continent that is inhabited by people who have the same colonial past of oppression and exploitation. The Berlin Conference, an enterprise of racists and capitalists split up the African continent into a pie where various European nations would exploit the mineral resources, and native population as they saw fit without them stepping on each other’s toes. This meant the establishment of borders between these nations that should have a common purpose and cause, and creating a warped sense of pride and ownership of one’s own exploited situation and supposed nation. South African black people become xenophobic because they firstly seem to think they should have a monopoly of the scraps of welfare they receive in South Africa, and because of a self-hate that is created by racism.

Racism, beyond being a structural, cultural, social and political oppression by one race over another, has and continues to inflict crippling harm to the black identity. The black identity is an anomaly, devoid of cultural development, destined to be subservient, a quintessential evil, criminal, threatening and violent. The black identity has been villainized to a point where even black people have accepted themselves as the site of moral and social degeneration of even their own societies. This is juxtaposed with a white identity that commands respect, epitomizes purity and dignity, is the site of safety, the epoch of development and civilization. The white skin and identity is an automatic indicator of legality and blackness in itself is illegal. This raises the question then is South Africa and the worlds problem with immigration and xenophobia one of fear of those foreign to that particular nation, or is it a problem of racism?

I would argue it is a problem of racism, particularly to South Africa. South Africa treats white foreign nationals and black foreign nationals completely different and this is informed by racism and its ideological underpinnings which I have mentioned. The black foreign national, whether with verified permit access to the country or not invites violence due to their dark skin, their fractured English accent and their cultural attire and norms. The African is disliked by black South Africans and white alike due to their African habits and origins, and flimsy arguments of them being a threat to the countries commerce, them being a site of rising crime and drug abuse or to the infrastructure of the country are presented as a logic for the violence meted out on them. Their white counterparts however do not receive the same treatment. No one questions the permit status of a white foreign national, there are no violent attacks on the white foreign national. No one questions their intentions in the country, the likelihood that they may pose a further threat to the economic sovereignty of a country where the minority of white people are in control of 80% of the land and wealth of the country. No one questions the possibility that the white foreign national might be in the country to further a booming human trafficking industry in Eastern Europe, or drug trade, or the export of mineral resources of the country as we continue to see booming markets such as diamonds and gold in Britain and the United States, or what is commonly called blood money extracted from poverty stricken African nations. The presence of white people in Africa, with all its historical implications and colonialism in mind, is never questioned, because to be white, wherever you go is to be legal, and one’s existence therefore in any space is warranted, as a tourist, an investor or messiah.

The immigration “problem” is therefore one of racism. It is a quest to separate people based on Western state concepts, in the case of Africa for exploitative expediency, monopolize resources and development for the interests of an elite minority within and outside South Africa, and denigrate identity of those that are not deemed worthy to be recipients of the above, while instilling conflict amongst a people with a shared past of oppression, and a common reality of exclusion and exploitation.

South Africa was bound to fall into this right-wing understanding of citizenship, the Trumpist outlook of statehood and sovereignty because it has been led by a political elite that does not have the ideological foresight to champion an Africanist struggle for independence, but rather entrenched separate development amongst its citizenry and a culture of self-hate. For a nation of people who were once harboured and protected in many African countries during the struggle against the brutal Apartheid regime, it is shameful to witness the ill treatment of fellow Africans in South Africa, but to diagnose it as simply conflict for resource, or protection of imaginary borders and sovereignty would be perpetuate a problem that is not African in form. The problem of xenophobia, of borders and immigration, is a problem of colonialism and by default, racism.