On 27 July, President Cyril Ramaphosa stood before the Pan-African Parliament and delivered perhaps the most balanced intervention on migration by an African leader in recent years. He condemned anti-migrant violence, acknowledged that illegal migration presents genuine concerns, rejected the scapegoating of migrants for South Africa's socioeconomic problems and argued that Africa must confront the governance failures that compel millions of Africans to leave their home countries in the first place. It was not simply a speech about migration. It was a challenge to rethink what Pan-Africanism demands of African states.
For too long, Pan-Africanism has been most visible when South Africa is the object of criticism. Whenever anti-illegal immigration protests erupt in South Africa, governments, commentators and civil society organisations across the continent rightly condemn intimidation, vigilantism and violence against migrants. However, they are far less vocal when governments elsewhere manipulate constitutions, weaken democratic institutions or create the conditions that compel millions of Africans to leave their countries.
This imbalance has become one of the defining contradictions of contemporary Pan-Africanism. It has become easier to condemn the consequences of migration than to confront its causes.
Importantly, President Ramaphosa's own speech recognised this contradiction. He drew a clear distinction between lawful migrants, refugees and asylum seekers and those who enter or remain in countries in violation of immigration laws. At the same time, he cautioned against blaming migrants for unemployment, crime or failures in public service delivery. In doing so, he rejected the false binary that has come to dominate public debate. A state can defend the dignity of migrants while enforcing its immigration laws. These are not mutually exclusive responsibilities.
But it was another part of the speech that deserves even greater attention.
President Ramaphosa noted that Africa must address "conflict, instability, governance failure, poverty and social discord" if it is to build a continent where Africans migrate "out of choice and not necessity". Later, he went further, calling on the Pan-African Parliament to defend constitutional democracy by opposing unlawful extensions of political tenure, the weakening of democratic institutions and the misuse of public resources.
These remarks should not be read as separate themes. They are causally connected.
Migration rarely begins at a border. It begins when governments fail. It begins when economies cease to create opportunity, when corruption diverts public resources, when democratic institutions lose credibility and when conflict destroys livelihoods. By the time migrants arrive at another country's border, the crisis that produced their movement has often been unfolding for years.
This is why the conversation about migration cannot begin and end with South Africa. South Africa undoubtedly has constitutional obligations to protect everyone within its borders from violence and discrimination while enforcing its immigration laws fairly and consistently. But African governments whose governance failures drive outward migration also bear responsibilities. Pan-Africanism loses credibility if it demands accountability from receiving states while remaining largely silent about the political failures of sending states.
The irony is that many of the issues President Ramaphosa identified, constitutional manipulation, governance failure, corruption and institutional decline, are precisely those that Pan-African institutions have often struggled to confront consistently. Zimbabwe's recent constitutional amendments, which critics argued required a national referendum, received nowhere near the continental attention that South Africa's anti-illegal-immigration protests received. Condemnations of xenophobia are immediate and unequivocal. Responses to democratic backsliding or constitutional manipulation have been far more uneven. However, both are part of the same political story. One concerns how migrants are treated after they move. The other concerns why they were compelled to move at all.
A mature Pan-Africanism cannot choose between these questions. It must insist on both.
The promise of African solidarity has never been simply about the freedom to move across borders. It has always been about creating conditions in which Africans are free to stay. Defending migrants from violence is therefore only half of the Pan-African project. The other half is demanding accountable governance, constitutional democracy and inclusive economic development across the continent.
If Pan-Africanism is to remain a credible political and moral project, it cannot begin and end with condemning xenophobia in South Africa. It must also confront, with equal consistency, the governance failures that continue to make migration a necessity rather than a choice.
Tinashe Sithole (PhD) is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the SARChI Chair African Diplomacy and Foreign Policy at the University of Johannesburg
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