Political elites and right-wing networks are weaponising poverty to scapegoat vulnerable African migrants, distracting the public from the capitalist inequality and state failures driving South Africa's crisis.
Opportunistic organisations such as March and March and Operation Dudula have mobilised communities across the country in ways that deepen dangerous divisions, not only between South Africans and foreign nationals living among us, but within our communities themselves. These are not spontaneous eruptions of popular anger. They are organised, directed, and deliberately stoked. But they have found a receptive audience: people so worn down by poverty that they needed only a spark to set them alight.
Like others, I reject March and March, its leadership, and everything they represent. No quarter should be given to their reactionary politics. No softening of language is appropriate here; no "engaging with their concerns" that is not, in the end, a legitimisation of hatred. They are doing the work of reaction and should be named as such.
We must ask who is funding, supporting and organising these mobilisations. They are not simply spontaneous expressions of working-class frustration but carefully built campaigns linked to wider right-wing networks.
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In South Africa, as in many other countries, sections of big business and wealthy, politically connected individuals help drive these campaigns. Figures such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump in the US, and Nigel Farage...
