South Africa's Words Ring Hollow While Africans Die

President Ramaphosa told Kenya’s President Ruto that “South Africans are not xenophobic.” The bodies of Mozambicans, Malawians and Nigerians say otherwise.

When President Cyril Ramaphosa stood beside Kenya’s President William Ruto during a State Visit at the Union Buildings and declared, “South Africans are not xenophobic. South Africans are Africans,” he was not apologising. He was performing. He was managing an image, on a stage built for diplomacy, while in the townships and informal settlements of his own country, Africans were being hunted, burned out of their homes, and buried.

It is partly true. Many South Africans are not xenophobic. They open their homes, their churches and their hearts to fellow Africans, and they deserve to be honoured for it. But it is also false, and dangerously so, to stand before the world and speak as though the violence sweeping this country is a rumour rather than a documented reality.

If South Africa is not xenophobic, why have more than 13,000 foreign nationals been repatriated or deported in a matter of weeks, according to the country’s own Border Management Authority? Why are more than 3,000 Malawians — including hundreds of children — sheltering in an open field in Durban, too afraid to go home to their rented rooms? Why did around 800 Mozambicans get caught up in violence in a single Western Cape settlement, their shacks burned, some while people were still inside?

This is the honest record, and it is already a disgrace. It should be stated plainly, without embellishment, because the truth alone is enough to convict a government that has failed to protect the people living within its borders — citizen and foreigner alike.

Nobody serious will accept a diplomatic soundbite as an apology, because it was never offered as one. Foreigners are still being harassed and threatened in front of police who do little to stop it. Vigilante movements have set their own “deadline” for undocumented migrants to leave — a deadline with no legal standing, enforced anyway through fear, fire, and force. Ordinary South Africans who simply look “foreign” have also been caught up in the violence. The line between citizen and outsider has blurred into something uglier: a hunt for anyone who does not fit a mob’s idea of who belongs.

How can any investor, any tourist, any partner nation trust a country where the rule of law bends to the mob? Capital is cautious by nature, and capital does not stay where it cannot rely on the state to keep order. A country wrestling with unemployment above 30 percent, and youth unemployment far higher still, cannot afford to also be known as a country where foreign workers, foreign shopkeepers and foreign families are burned out of their homes while officers stand and watch.

President Ramaphosa’s government, and the coalition that props it up, owns this moment. Words delivered at a state banquet do not repair a burned shack in Mossel Bay. They do not return a father to his children in Pietermaritzburg. They do not answer the question every displaced family is asking: why did our neighbours turn on us, and why did the state let them?

I do not write this to abandon hope for South Africa or for Africa. I write it because hope without honesty is just another performance — the same performance offered at that state visit while the fires were still smouldering in the Western Cape. Real hope requires the harder work: truth-telling, accountability, and building alternatives so our people are never forced to choose between poverty at home and violence abroad.

This is why Makumbirofa Farms exists. Our vision is simple: build self-sufficiency in Chegutu, Zimbabwe, so our youth have a reason to stay, to build, and to prosper — rather than risking their lives in xenophobic mobs abroad or in the hands of traffickers who prey on desperation. Life under economic collapse in Zimbabwe is hard, and it pushes our people into dangerous choices. We are working to change that, one farm, one job, one family at a time.