A broken home looking for a villain to blame

26 JUN 2026, 00:00

8 min read

As many marched to the Union Buildings and Gauteng legislature to demand the removal of undocumented migrants from South Africa, the placards read “Abahambe”. 

The message is clear: migrants must go; they have no place here. South Africa is in crisis and migrants are to blame. However, by tomorrow, the cameras will move on ... and the questions underneath the march will remain: who are we really fighting?

What’s unfolding is not simply a protest against migration but a protest against abandonment; against unemployment, failing municipalities, collapsing services and a state that increasingly feels absent from everyday life. 

But instead of confronting those structures directly, the anger is misdirected and it settles on the most visible, least protected targets: African foreign nationals.

At this moment, South Africa looks less like a country addressing its problems. If anything, South Africa looks like a broken home in search of a villain: a nation pacing the corridors of its own disappointments, looking for someone — anyone — to blame for the lights that don't stay on, the taps that stay dry, the jobs that never come, the reality of feeling “stuck" and the promised futures that never became. 

In that frustrated search, it keeps landing on the same body: the foreign one. Not because migrants caused this decay but because they are visible, available and politically profitable targets. Here's the truth we keep avoiding: when a country is hurting, it hunts. And right now, it's hunting the wrong people.

To talk about xenophobia in South Africa is not to ignore the sharp edge of unemployment, the exhaustion of poverty or the betrayal of state neglect. 

To dismiss movements like March and March, Operation Dudula and others outright would be intellectually and politically irresponsible. The frustrations are real. But anger becomes dangerous when the story we tell about the cause is wrong.

The leap from crisis to migrant blame is not grounded in evidence; it is grounded in narrative. 

This became a politically projected dominant narrative when the minister of home affairs publicly proclaimed in 1997 that migrants were the cause of unemployment in South Africa and that sentiment has since blossomed into what stands before us today.

In my research with Zimbabwean migrants in Potchefstroom and my doctoral fieldwork with Southern African Development Community (SADC) migrants in Johannesburg, migrants describe navigating urban spaces that both depend on and exclude them. 

They build livelihoods in informal economies, rely on dense social networks and develop strategies to survive in environments marked by bureaucratic hostility.

In exchanges with South Africans during fieldwork, I found a striking pattern: migrants were framed as economic threats even in spaces where they had little structural power. 

Their presence symbolised intrusion, not because they displaced anyone but because residents were already abandoned by the local government. The foreigner became a stand-in for deeper anxieties about economic insecurity and state failure.

My field interactions consistently revealed that migrants aren't taking jobs; employers are exploiting broken labour systems. Migrants aren't draining services; they are either using them out of necessity or avoiding them out of fear. 

Migrants aren't collapsing systems; they are adapting to systems that had already collapsed. They are not the source of the state's failures but witnesses to them — adapting to conditions they did not create.

Who gets to be a person and where? Who is a disposable non-person? It is this complexity that defines the politics of personhood. Politicians perform migration as a crisis because it wins votes. 

Talk-show hosts rehearse suspicions as though they were evidence. WhatsApp forwards mutate into “truths" that no one bothers to verify. As fear circulates, it searches for a face and the foreigner becomes that face. We are trying to fix institutional crises by blaming individuals, even schoolchildren. It has never worked and it never will.

In the inner city of Johannesburg, a different story is unfolding. In my fieldwork, I met a Mozambican mechanic teaching his younger South African neighbour to weld, exchanging skill for belonging. I met Zimbabwean hairdressers who converted a narrow passageway into a salon, creating a small economy of beauty and trust. 

I met a Mosotho mother who works as a domestic worker while also running a weekend food stall that became a fragile but real space of cohesion, where migrants and locals shared stories over plates of food.

These people cannot be perceived as passive victims or criminals. In fact, they are doing what the state cannot: building informal systems of care, credit and safety in the gaps that governance has abandoned.

Regardless of how justified but misdirected angry outcries may be, the bottom line is that migrants are co-authoring Johannesburg's story. They have been central to South Africa's national narrative since its inception, yet our public discourse refuses to see it. Instead, migrants become the personification of public issues.

Lost in today's spectacle are the everyday realities of migrant life: the small businesses that sustain township economies, the remittance networks that support families across borders and the informal systems of care that fill gaps left by the state. These are not marginal or subjective activities; they are central to how this country functions.

Election season always brings a spike in migrant-blaming; the timing is never a coincidence. It is politically efficient to convert frustration into suspicion and direct it downward, never upward, deflecting state failures onto the scapegoated “other". But this logic is weak when scrutinised. If migrants are the problem, then governance is no longer the issue.

We keep acting as if anger alone is a solution. But you cannot fix a leaking roof by shouting at the rain.

Unemployment is not produced by migration but by structural inequality and economic stagnation. Service delivery breakdown is not driven by migrants but by institutional decay. Migration may intersect with these issues but it does not cause them.

What we need is to treat migration as a policy matter, not a panic button. That means fixing Home Affairs rather than inflaming hostility. It means enforcing labour protections rather than criminalising exploited workers. 

It means building inclusive local economies rather than ghettoising foreigners. It means basing public education on facts, not rumours. And it means refusing political rhetoric that criminalises African mobility on African soil.

South Africa has a right to manage migration; however, it does not have a right to dehumanise people in the process.

There is something deeply troubling about a society that repeatedly turns its frustration outward rather than upward. When anger is directed at migrants, it is displaced. And in that displacement, the underlying problems remain unresolved.

Blaming migrants may offer a sense of immediate action but it does not rebuild institutions, create jobs or restore dignity to communities that feel neglected. It only deepens division.

If South Africa is serious about addressing its challenges, the conversation must shift from migrants to governance; from blame to accountability; from fear to evidence. This means engaging with migration honestly as a complex social phenomenon shaped by regional dynamics, economic realities and human aspirations.

Some will argue that this perspective ignores the pressures migration places on communities; that it is too sympathetic, too academic and too detached from lived frustration. But this misreads the argument.

Recognising migrant agency does not mean denying social tension. It means locating that tension within its proper context. 

Fieldwork consistently shows that where communities experience the greatest strain, it is not because migrants are overwhelming systems; it is because those systems have already failed.

Migrants become visible at the point of collapse and are then blamed for it. This is analysis grounded in evidence, not sentiment.

South Africa is broken ... perhaps. But it must not become brutal. If we want renewal, we must confront systems, not strangers. Because no matter how many migrants we chase away, the problems chasing us will still be here in the morning.

The question is not whether South Africa has a migration problem. The question is why a country facing deep structural challenges continues to respond by targeting those with the least power to change them.

Until such questions are confronted, marches will continue. Anger will grow. And the real sources of crisis will remain untouched.

Kwezi Sontange is a sociologist at North-West University whose research follows SADC migrants through the streets, the stories and the silences of postcolonial South Africa. @TruScholar_X