Xenophobia is a lazy diagnosis — South Africa’s real crisis is below the breadline

The scene we keep ignoring

I was nine years old the first time I understood what it meant to be blamed for retaliating against something no one would stop.

I was living with a family in Pietermaritzburg – placed there by circumstances, dependent on their goodwill, and subject to their rules. Their daughter, Natalie*, was eight years old. She had immunity I did not. She could hit me, throw things at me, and face no consequence. Her mother would find ways to rationalise it every time. My role was to absorb it – because I was a boy, and boys don’t hit girls.

Natalie understood her immunity perfectly. She and her cousins would collect cockroaches at night and put them in my ears while I slept. Her mother said nothing.

Then one night, she set off a Woodcracker firework between my toes as I lay sleeping.

Her mother gave her a lame, empty warning.

I had reported the behaviour. I had absorbed it. I had been told, repeatedly, that the consequences of retaliating would fall on me – not her.

So when I finally snapped and sent her screaming across the room with a kick, I became the aggressor. The one who had acted. The one who could be pointed at.

The system that had ignored every complaint, protected every provocation and guaranteed every injustice disappeared from the story entirely.

I think about that dynamic often when I hear the word xenophobia.

The word that does too much work

South Africa does not have a simple xenophobia problem.

It has a poverty problem, a labour market problem and a state failure problem – all of which are being collapsed into a single, convenient word: xenophobia.

The word is doing too much work – and too little thinking.

When violence erupts, the diagnosis arrives almost instantly. South Africans are xenophobic. The story settles. The outrage follows. The moral lines are drawn.

But the explanation is too thin for the weight it carries.

Because what we are witnessing is not simply hatred of the “other”. It is something far more uncomfortable: a collision between the poor in a system that has left too many people with too little.

The cockroaches go in the ears. The firework goes between the toes. And when the kick finally comes, only the kick gets a name.

History should make us slower to simplify

There is a deeper irony here – one that cuts close to home for this continent.

Historically, it was Africans who were stripped of distinction. Under the Atlantic slave trade, Africans were not Zulu, Xhosa, Yoruba or Shona – they were cargo. Packed into ships, forced into proximity, made to compete for survival and then labelled “savages” for behaviours produced by deprivation. Their complexity was erased so that their exploitation could be justified.

Europe did not undergo the same flattening in the same way. The Irish were poor. Italians were marginalised. But they were not reduced into a single racial mass. Their distinctions remained legible, even within hierarchy.

That history matters – not as a direct comparison, but as a warning about the danger of flattening complex social realities into single moral labels.

Because today, we risk a similar move – this time not of Africans, but of South Africans themselves.

A fractured, economically driven conflict is reduced to one word.

Xenophobic.

The mechanisms are categorically different. But the analytical error is the same: when we cannot bear complexity, we reach for a label. And the label does the thinking for us.

Where the tension actually lives

South Africans do not broadly reject foreigners.

We worship together. Study together. Build businesses together. Across cities and campuses, foreign nationals are part of the everyday fabric of life. There is no widespread, national hostility that defines ordinary interaction.

The tension emerges somewhere far more specific.

Below the breadline.

In informal settlements, townships and economically strained urban edges – places where survival is already contested – the dynamics shift.

Here, the struggle is not ideological. It is material.

People are not competing over identity. They are competing over food, jobs, space and dignity.

South Africa’s official unemployment rate is about 32%, rising above 40% when discouraged work seekers are included. Among young people, it exceeds 60%. At the same time, the informal sector sustains millions of livelihoods with minimal protection, weak regulation and intense competition.

In such an environment, scarcity is not theoretical. It is daily.

What the data actually show

The numbers complicate the story.

South Africa’s informal sector employs roughly one in five workers – about 21% of total employment. By global standards that is not large. In many African economies the informal sector absorbs more than 60% of workers. Here, it does not. It is too small to carry the weight placed on it.

Foreign nationals make up roughly 5% of South Africa’s workforce – yet they are blamed for a crisis created by a labour market that cannot absorb its own people, and an informal economy built for survival, not prosperity. They are a visible presence in certain sectors, particularly informal trade, where they account for about one in five workers. But they do not dominate the labour market nationally.

The imbalance is not numerical. It is structural.

Migrants are more likely to operate informally, and more likely to accept lower wages. In a labour market already under strain, this creates a powerful incentive for employers.

Wages tell the story clearly. According to Statistics SA’s 2025 Quarterly Labour Force Survey, earnings across much of the informal sector frequently fall between R1,200 and R2,000 per month. In the formal economy, comparable work may earn three to 10 times more. When employers can access labour that is cheaper, less protected and less able to resist, the direction of hiring becomes predictable.

This is not primarily a story about identity. It is a story about labour arbitrage.

What we are hearing on the ground

Listen carefully to how this issue is spoken about in public.

In marches, interviews and community conversations across the country, a familiar pattern emerges. The language is often strong – even inflammatory. Words like “invasion” surface. Calls for mass deportation are made. Political actors align themselves with these sentiments, amplifying them through platforms and policy proposals.

It is easy to stop there – to hear only the rhetoric.

But beneath the language sits something more revealing. The justification is rarely cultural. It is economic.

People speak about hunger. They speak about unemployment – millions locked out of the economy. They speak about small businesses under pressure, informal trade becoming overcrowded and opportunities narrowing in already fragile communities.

The anger is not emerging in affluent suburbs or corporate boardrooms. It is emerging from spaces where survival is already contested. And in those spaces, the line between “foreigner” and “competitor” begins to blur.

The rhetoric may be national. But the pressure is local.

The invisible hand that escapes blame

Into this already fragile environment enters another force – one that receives far less attention.

Unscrupulous employers.

Across sectors like construction, hospitality, security and informal trade there are employers who deliberately hire undocumented or highly vulnerable foreign workers. Not out of generosity, but out of calculation. Lower wages. Fewer protections. Less resistance. Minimal compliance with labour law.

This is not anecdotal. The Department of Employment and Labour’s inspection reports have repeatedly flagged noncompliant workplaces in construction and hospitality as sites of systematic underpayment – often involving vulnerable migrant workers. In Johannesburg’s CBD and parts of the Western Cape agricultural belt, labour brokers have been documented exploiting undocumented workers at rates well below the national minimum wage of R30.23 per hour, with little consequence.

The effect is predictable. Wages are suppressed. Standards are eroded. Local workers are displaced or undercut.

This is the quiet engine of the conflict.

And yet, when tensions rise, the employer disappears from the story. The system disappears. The state disappears. What remains is a visible conflict between the poor – and a convenient label to explain it.

Natalie’s mother disappears. Only the kick remains.

The politics of misdiagnosis

Calling this “xenophobia” without qualification is not only analytically weak. It is politically useful.

It shifts attention away from structural failure and redirects it towards interpersonal conflict. It frames the problem as moral deficiency among the poor, rather than systemic breakdown across the economy.

The result is a kind of public theatre. We condemn the violence – rightly. We call for tolerance – understandably. But we leave untouched the conditions that produced the conflict in the first place.

And so the cycle repeats.

This is not a defence of violence

None of this is an excuse for violence.

It is a rejection of lazy explanation.

Violence against foreign nationals is wrong. It is unjust. It must be confronted wherever it appears.

But if we misdiagnose the cause, we guarantee the outcome. A child who has reported the abuse, absorbed the abuse and been abandoned by every authority responsible for stopping it, cannot be judged solely by the moment they finally fought back. The judge who ignores everything that preceded the kick is not delivering justice. They are completing the injustice.

Explaining is not excusing. It is the beginning of solving.

What an honest diagnosis requires

Here is what makes the four interventions required not merely desirable, but inescapable: every year we delay them, the same conflict will return. Not because South Africans are uniquely hateful, but because the structural conditions that produce the conflict remain perfectly intact.

A serious industrial policy targeting job creation in construction, informal trade and entry-level services is not optional – it is the only way to relieve pressure in the zones where conflict ignites. Rigorous enforcement of the national minimum wage and Basic Conditions of Employment Act, with penalties substantial enough to make labour arbitrage unprofitable, is not bureaucratic detail – it is the direct removal of the incentive that drives displacement. A functional immigration system capable of processing and managing migrant labour transparently is not a concession to nativism – it is the only way to protect both foreign nationals and local workers from the exploitation that currently pits them against each other. And investment in community-level mediation infrastructure in high-tension areas is not soft policy – it is a pressure valve in a system that currently has none.

These are not good ideas. They are the minimum required to stop repeating the same tragedy and calling it a mystery.

The deeper tragedy

The tragedy is not only that violence occurs. It is that the anger is misdirected.

People who have been left out of the economy are turned against others who are equally desperate to survive. The conflict is real but the framing is incomplete.

This is not hatred at the top. It is pressure at the bottom.

And when pressure builds without release – when every complaint is ignored, every provocation protected and every structural failure left unaddressed – it finds the nearest point of contact.

We call that contact xenophobia.

We do not ask what lit the fuse.

Beyond the word

South Africa does not need simpler language. It needs more honest thinking – and more courageous policy.

“Xenophobia” may describe part of what we see. But it does not explain it. And explanation is where solutions begin.

The employers who profit from vulnerability must be held accountable. The labour market that produces such acute desperation must be reformed. The state that has failed to regulate, protect and mediate must be pressured to act.

Natalie’s mother cannot keep issuing empty warnings and then act surprised when someone finally kicks back.

Until we confront the structure, we will keep blaming the symptoms – and calling it understanding. DM

* Not her real name