When leaders talk of ‘taking up arms’: Migration, power and the perilous politics of blame

When a senior political leader publicly suggests that young people should be ready to “take up arms” to remove undocumented foreign nationals, the statement should alarm us, not only because of its violent imagery, but because of what it reveals about how migration, economic frustration and political power are being stitched together in contemporary southern Africa.

Recent remarks by ANC Youth League president Collen Malatji, reported widely in South Africa and beyond, have reignited a volatile debate about migration, crime, unemployment and belonging.

The comments are striking, but they are also sociologically revealing. They expose how migration has become a political language of convenience, a shorthand through which deeper structural failures are displaced on to the most vulnerable.

This is not just a South African issue. It is a regional one, with implications for Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho and the broader Southern African Development Community (SADC). The way South Africa talks about migrants inevitably shapes how migrants are treated, and how neighbouring countries understand their own citizens’ place in the region.

The politics of frustration

There is no denying the social context in which such statements land. South Africa faces persistently high unemployment, with youth unemployment exceeding 40%. Many communities experience chronic service delivery failures, rising insecurity and a deep sense that the post-apartheid promise of inclusion has stalled.

These frustrations are real. They are lived daily in townships, informal settlements and rural areas. But history teaches us that real frustration does not automatically produce good politics. When political leaders invoke migrants as the source of social breakdown, they are not solving these problems – they are redirecting anger.

Sociologists call this scapegoating: a process where complex, structural problems are simplified by locating blame in a visible “other”. Migrants become symbols of everything that feels broken, from jobs, housing, safety, even when evidence does not support such claims. This is how migration shifts from being a policy issue to becoming a moral drama.

Migration is not the same as criminality

It is essential to draw a clear line between legitimate debates about migration, governance and language that risk fuelling xenophobia.

Every state has the right and responsibility to manage its borders and immigration systems. Irregular migration raises real policy challenges around documentation, labour regulation and service provision. But conflating undocumented migration with criminality “in general” is analytically sloppy and socially dangerous.

Decades of research across southern Africa show no simple or direct relationship between migration and crime. Crime is driven by a complex mix of inequality, policing capacity, urban marginalisation, organised criminal networks and social dislocation, factors that long predate current migration patterns.

When migrants are framed as criminals by default, entire communities are stigmatised. Zimbabwean, Mozambican, Malawian, Congolese and Somali migrants, many of whom are workers, entrepreneurs, caregivers and taxpayers, are reduced to threats. This is not governance. It is collective punishment by rhetoric.

Youth unemployment cannot be solved by exclusion

Calls to mobilise youth against migrants are especially troubling in a context of mass youth unemployment.

Young people are being told, implicitly, that their economic exclusion is the fault of outsiders rather than the result of structural economic failures. But unemployment is not caused by migrants. It is caused by slow economic growth, skills mismatches, weak industrial policy, underinvestment in education and deeply unequal access to opportunity.

These are governance problems, not migration problems. Targeting migrants may feel emotionally satisfying, but it does nothing to create jobs.

Instead, it risks entrenching a politics of resentment, where solidarity among the excluded is replaced by competition between the poor. For Zimbabweans watching this debate from across the border, the message is chilling: your economic survival strategy, migration, can be recast overnight as criminality or invasion, depending on the political moment.

Language as a form of power

Political language is not neutral. Words shape social reality. When leaders speak of “taking up arms”, they normalise the idea that violence is an acceptable response to policy failure. They blur the line between lawful governance and vigilantism. And they give social permission for ordinary citizens to imagine themselves as enforcers rather than neighbours.

Social science research shows that discursive violence often precedes physical violence. Before people are attacked, they are named, blamed, and dehumanised. We have seen this pattern before, in xenophobic attacks, forced evictions and neighbourhood “clean-up” campaigns that quickly turn deadly. Leadership matters precisely because it sets the tone of what is thinkable.

The regional blind spot

What is often missing from South Africa’s migration debate is a regional perspective. Southern Africa is not a collection of isolated national economies; it is an interdependent system shaped by colonial labour migration, apartheid-era regional destabilisation and contemporary economic inequality.

South Africa’s mines, farms, hospitals, homes, and informal economies have long relied on migrant labour from neighbouring countries. At the same time, economic collapse and political instability in countries such as Zimbabwe have pushed millions into cross-border mobility as a survival strategy.

Migration is not a moral failure; it is a structural response to uneven development. Therefore, framing migrants as invaders ignores this shared history and absolves states, both sending and receiving, of responsibility for regional economic reform.

What a serious migration debate would look like

If leaders are serious about addressing migration-related tensions, the conversation must move beyond slogans and threats.

A serious debate would ask:

• How can border management be strengthened without violating human rights?
• How can labour markets be regulated to prevent exploitation of both migrants and citizens?
• How can regional economic cooperation reduce forced migration rather than criminalise it?
• How can policing be improved to address crime without racialising or nationalising it?

These are difficult questions, but they are policy questions, not calls to arms.

For South Africa, the danger is that violent rhetoric corrodes democratic norms and deepens social fragmentation.

For Zimbabwe and other African sending nations, the danger is that millions of their citizens abroad become politically expendable, useful only when remittances flow and invisible when dignity is threatened.

For both, the broader risk is this: when leaders substitute blame for reform, societies slide from accountability into anger, from politics into spectacle.

Migration will remain part of southern Africa’s future. The only real choice is whether it is managed through law, evidence and solidarity, or through fear, exclusion and force. History is clear on where the second path leads. The question is whether we are willing to learn from it. DM

Tinashe Chimbidzikai is a sociologist with interests in migration, African urbanity and Pentecostalism. His research broadly examines how aspirations, religion, and governance shape mobility and displacement in contexts of protracted crisis. His work informs critical discussions on humanitarian governance, urban precarity and moral economies in African migration.