Jacinta Zuma-Ngobese is right. When she pleads for action against undocumented migrants — foreign drug dealers, human and cigarette traffickers, kidnappers, scammers and all the undesirables who are here illegally — she speaks for millions of South African mothers.
I've sat with those mothers. I've seen their sons and daughters become amaPhara — nyaope boys and girls — exiled from their own homes by addiction. The anguish is real. But that anguish doesn't reach the Union Buildings. It doesn't reach the suburbs of the political elite, the rich or the black middle class who are insulated from the daily wreckage of poverty, unemployment and substance abuse.
In the townships and informal settlements, the crisis is visible. You can't miss it. Walk through Hillbrow and Berea in Johannesburg, Sunnyside in Pretoria, California in kuGompo or Durban Point. The police know the hotspots. We all do. Yet nothing changes. It took citizen activism for them to act. We saw footage of the marchers leading the police to the drug dens, where they also found a 13-year-old breastfeeding a baby.
Communities are being hollowed out by drug networks operating in so-called "no-go areas" and the state response ranges from indifference to complicity.
The numbers don't lie; even if the government won't collect them. Over the past decade, the uncontrolled presence of drug syndicates — including networks linked to Nigerian, Colombian and more recently, Mexican operations — has coincided with a massive increase in local drug manufacturing and distribution.
The result: a growing population of young addicts in townships and rural villages. You see them everywhere now. Children as young as 13, sometimes younger, hooked on mandrax, tik, crystal meth and whatever new concoction hits the street this month.
They are not statistics to us. They are our neighbours' children. They are our nieces and nephews.
For families, this is not a policy debate. It's life and death. We saw uGogo in kuGompo last month who has turned her bedroom into a fortress — iron bars on the door and windows jammed with wire — because her three grandsons have stripped the house bare to feed their habit.
She told a reporter she's not scared they'll kill her because the type of drug they are on turns them into "drooling zombies". They can't even wipe their own noses. That's the level we've reached. Grandmothers building cages to survive their own grandchildren because of drugs.
She's not alone. Across this country, households are under siege. Stoves, TVs, clothes, food — everything gets stolen and sold. When there's nothing left at home, the addicts turn to the streets. Robbery, often violent, becomes survival. The social fabric is tearing and poor families are left to pick up the pieces without help, without data and without a plan.
If the government can't tell us how many undocumented migrants are in South Africa, why should we trust it to know how many children are addicted? It doesn't. But go to Berea in Johannesburg's city centre. Look under the bridges, in the parks and in hijacked buildings. You'll find colonies of young people who've chosen the street because it's safer to use there than at home.
In the townships, they occupy empty houses. They are South Africa's children. And the so-called leaders of this country act like they don't exist.
The problem escalated after the Covid-19 SRD grant of R350, now R370. How that figure was calculated, no one can explain. We were told during the lockdown that the government was also "catering to migrants" who chose to stay when their countries also received funding during the pandemic.
Yet our own people are given R370 and told to survive. Meanwhile, R1.6 billion was supposedly allocated to fight gender-based violence. Where did it go? Because the women I speak to are living GBV daily — not just from men but from addicted sons, grandsons and from a state that abandons them to criminal syndicates.
I ask the questions these women are asking: Why does a government that can't protect its own citizens continue to tolerate drug and human trafficking networks in our communities? Why are the pleas of mothers like Daleen James ignored? Why is there no declared war on drugs from the government of national unity? Only smaller parties such as ATM and ActionSA ever talk about the scourge of drug links to undocumented criminal migrants.
We are not naïve. The Madlanga commission has exposed allegations of links between politicians and criminal cartels. We read reports on allegations of vote-buying at the ANC's 55th Elective Conference in Nasrec in 2017, levelled by some party members.
If the allegations and rumours are true that money from drugs and money laundering through foreign-owned and run spaza shops is funding political campaigns, then the silence from the top makes sense. It's not incompetence. It's complicity.
Leaders talk about women's empowerment while ignoring women who are literally barricading themselves in their bedrooms. They announce billions for GBV while mothers say they are under siege in their own homes.
You cannot claim to fight gender-based violence while you let the drug trade destroy the very communities where women and children live.
The women are crying out. As a man, as a father, as a South African, I'm amplifying them. We don't need another summit. We need arrests. We need the syndicates shut down. We need our streets back.
Don't shoot the victims. The leaders of the marchers and thousands of their followers on our streets are not crazy, hateful people who loathe foreigners. They represent a community, a country that has had enough of all the undocumented undesirables running amok in our communities.
Something has to be done about the free flow of narcotics in our country and it has to be done now before there's another generation lost.
Mbuyiselo Botha is a founder member of the South African Men’s Forum