The X-word gets trotted out like a beauty pageant contestant to dismiss legitimate border control issues. (Frederik Lerneryd)
Anyone who has tried holding a meaningful conversation in a packed tavern, one breaking all health and safety laws, will understand my difficulty in writing a satirical column about the emotive immigration issue.
Currently, social media resembles a cacophony of noise emitted by drunk revellers shouting a discussion about whether men are really from Mars and women from Venus, while competing with a Brenda Fassie classic blaring from Bra Steve’s cheap jukebox speakers.
Still, to copy that one guy who frequents taverns, only to sit on an empty beer crate and drink Tropika, I think it is necessary to interject and try to get my point across.
So, here goes …
In 2021 and 2022, the Mail & Guardian published a series of articles I investigated about foreign syndicates operating in the country and trafficking in people from predominantly Asia and Africa to come into South Africa and do menial and hard labour jobs.
One article was based on a confidential crime intelligence investigation tracking kidnappings from 2018 to 2021, showing how piles of fraudulent South African passports and asylum-seeker documents were found during police operations, including an April 2019 raid that rescued 36 human trafficking victims.
The investigative report added that people are kidnapped from their countries — again, mostly from Asia and Africa — to be brought into South Africa where ransoms are demanded, and hostages repatriated to their home nations, once their families have paid the asking fees.
“The minimum ransom demanded is R10 million. [In] most of the cases, the ransom is paid in foreign countries like Dubai [in the United Arab Emirates] and Mozambique,” stated the report, which was based on 119 tactical operations over three years.
Just last week, Judy Zuma, a former home affairs department official, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for running a racket selling 192 fraudulent passports at R4 000 a pop to foreign nationals who did not qualify for papers.
Further, there are genuine concerns about black South African township residents being priced out of the low end of the labour market because of unchecked immigration — as was the case in the tragic George building collapse where immigrant workers were paid a pitiful R85 a day at the construction site.
It is in the above context that many South Africans have demanded greater oversight and inspection of immigration offices and the country’s borders, like it was Oom Pieter Groenewald performing his weekly body-cavity searches in Johannesburg’s Sun City prison.
Sadly, all of these concerns are lumped with valid fears of xenophobia owing to this country’s brutal and deadly history of attacks on foreign nationals from, in the main, Africa.
The problem with lumping all immigration scrutiny with xenophobia ensures that reaching a middle ground — which factors in a need to cater to asylum seekers while protecting native South Africans — will stretch out longer than it will take football club Kaizer Chiefs to play their first game of the new 2024-25 Premier Soccer League season.
What it also does is open a vacuum for opportunistic politicians to take advantage of fair worries, such as Patriotic Alliance (PA) leader Gayton “Abahambe” McKenzie, who ran an incendiary campaign for the May 2024 national elections that included claiming he would switch off the life-support machines of any “illegal” foreigner in a state hospital, in favour of a South African.
The PA leader’s tactics (or antics) have seemingly worked because he is now the sports, arts and culture minister.
There is a viral video of a screaming match between a South African property owner, a woman, claiming that a man, purportedly from Nigeria, is allegedly refusing to pay rent.
In the video, the woman threatens to summon McKenzie to deal with the tenant, as if the minister were a genie in a bottle the property owner had rubbed three times.
And it’s not because the minister would resemble the character from the Disney movie Aladdin if he were to be painted shocking blue from head to toe.
Rather, the woman saw McKenzie, however vile his rhetoric was, as the only politician not afraid to raise the contentious immigration question.
It is the same in the US, where former president Donald Trump is polling as high as 23% among African Americans, priming the Orange Ogre to become the most successful Republican presidential candidate among black people since at least the 1960s.
This is despite Trump hosting Ku Klux Klan white supremacist members, referring to black senior state attorneys as “animals” or the slew of other rabidly racist rants he is known for.
And it’s not because African Americans choosing Trump are self-hating blacks, coon Uncle Toms — or whatever insults so-called pan-Africanists hurl the way of people who don’t exist in their ideological bubbles.
Rather, it is because Trump recognises that the African American working class is priced out of the lower end of the labour market with unmitigated immigration. It’s a matter of survival.
Meanwhile, the US left, represented by the Democrats, is more concerned with advocating for gluten-free food and glorified windmills to power industries, killing off the same working-class jobs they profess to represent, than with seeing the loss of a core voter base it has held for more than half a century.
This brings us to the elephant in the room — the controversy surrounding Miss South Africa, particularly contestant Chidimma Adetshina, born of immigrant parents of Nigerian and Mozambican descent.
Criticism of her involvement has been largely on people claiming patriotism and what it means to be a proud South African.
One cannot dismiss the foul and xenophobic hate Adetshina has been bombarded with, especially online.
However, the vitriol from the noisy minority should not dismiss valid claims of patriotism.
The show of patriotism has morphed into the new online and social media trend: No DNA, just RSA.
Basically, the trend, as far as I can discern, seeks to promote South African exceptionalism — whether rightly or wrongly — in celebrating the country’s achievements.
It became more pronounced when the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup last October, gaining momentum when Bafana Bafana came third at the Africa Cup of Nations, and has continued for every South African achievement or what people love and value in the country.
The trend’s proponents should not be discouraged by those who hold a different ideological view.
Nor should the “patriots” keep quiet and allow those among them to spew hateful and xenophobic rubbish without being called out on it, including that Genie in the Bottle McKenzie.
Which will, in turn, prevent the X-word from being trotted out like a beauty pageant contestant in dismissing legitimate immigration and border control issues.