Scapegoating the stranger — xenophobia exposes SA’s hollowed-out state capacity

Five years ago I buried my mother, and I wrote that corruption was a disease.

I was half-right.

She died of Covid at the height of the pandemic. But the virus is rarely the whole story. Gogo Dlamini had underlying conditions — the hereditary kind our history hands down, and the lifestyle kind we inflict on ourselves — and the doctors were honest with me about how it works. It finds a body whose defences have already been worn thin, and it finishes what years of quieter damage began. What took my mother was not only the thing that arrived. It was everything that had left her unable to fight it off.

Nations die the way bodies do. Rarely from a single wound. More often from years of accumulated weakness that leave them unable to survive the next shock.

So when I am told that South Africa’s problem is the migrant — the foreigner, the man who runs the spaza two streets down in Braamfontein, the one competing for the same scarce rand — I want to say what the doctors said to me. Before you name the infection, look at what was already broken.

This is the distinction we keep refusing to make. A symptom is not a cause. The anger toward migrants is a symptom; the disease is institutional decay. The fights over scarce jobs are a symptom; the disease is an economy that has stopped producing them. The fury at undocumented immigration is a symptom; the disease is a state that can no longer enforce its own laws — at the border or anywhere else.

A strong state can govern the stranger.

A failing one can only hunt him.

On the evidence, we are closer to the second. The numbers are not a matter of feeling. In the first quarter of 2026, the official unemployment rate reached 32.7% — 8.1 million people — and on the broader measure that counts those who have given up looking, the figure rises to 43.7%: closer to half than to a third.

The rot is not new: over the past decade, the share of the unemployed who have been jobless long-term has risen from roughly 65% to more than 77%. This is not a body that caught a cold last week. This is a body whose immune system has been failing, quietly, for years.

This is not a country that failed to understand its own condition. In 2012, the state wrote itself a prescription. The National Development Plan set the target of cutting unemployment to 6% by 2030, carried by growth of 5.4% a year and 11 million new jobs. The year 2030 is now months away. Unemployment stands at 32.7% — more than five times what the plan promised. Growth has spent years nearer to 1% than to 5%. The jobs never came. The diagnosis was sound; we simply never took the medicine.

That is why I now think my 2020 metaphor was incomplete. Corruption is not the disease. It is the immune deficiency that lets every other disease take hold. A deficiency does not give you one illness; it strips you of the capacity to survive any of them. It is the reason an ordinary shock becomes a catastrophe. Countries all over the world receive migrants. Many feel strain. Few convulse the way we convulse, on the same corners, in the same season, year after year. The difference is not that more people arrive here. The difference is that we have spent decades allowing the system that was supposed to absorb the pressure to decay.

Pressure test

Because migration, in the end, is not the disease. It is the pressure test — the thing that reveals whether the institutions behind it are sound. A functioning state knows who crosses its border. It processes permits before they expire. It enforces labour law evenly, so that the undercutting of wages is policed rather than resented. It protects the migrant who is here lawfully and removes, through lawful means, the one who is not. Above all, it grows an economy large enough to carry the labour it has. We have failed on every one of these fronts, for reasons that by now are painfully familiar.

Every looted tender is a weakened institution. Every cadre deployed for loyalty rather than competence weakens the institution. Every collapsed municipality, every dysfunctional border post, every procurement scandal — each one is a defence stripped away. Strip away enough of them, and the state loses the ability to perform its most basic functions. Then the citizen, sensing correctly that something has been stolen from him, goes looking for a face to blame. The foreign shopkeeper is an easier face than a failed procurement process. The undocumented worker is an easier target than a collapsed economic strategy. The migrant is easier to confront than the elite who hollowed the state out.

Scapegoats have always flourished where accountability has collapsed. They offer the appearance of action without the inconvenience of reform.

None of this means the concerns about immigration are illegitimate. A sovereign country has every right to know who enters it, to enforce its borders, and to remove those unlawfully present. The rule of law matters. But the rule of law is only credible when it cuts both ways, and that is the part we are reluctant to say out loud. It applies to the migrant and to the minister. To the man without papers — told to respect the law, to wait his turn, to calm his anger — and to the powerful man who can keep millions in undeclared foreign currency hidden in his furniture and watch the matter dissolve into panels and procedural off-ramps.

When the same citizen who is lectured about order on a Braamfontein street corner can see, on the news, what order asks of those at the very top, the lecture rings hollow. The quickest way to destroy respect for the law is to apply it selectively. Citizens can tolerate strict enforcement. What they cannot tolerate is unequal enforcement. You cannot demand documentation from the powerless while extending impunity to the powerful — and then wonder why the social fabric frays.

Global market

The choice is not between citizens and migrants. A capable state protects lawful migrants and its own citizens at the same time. Only a failing state convinces people they must choose between the two.

I take seriously the strongest objection my earlier writing drew. South African workers do compete in a global market. The example thrown at me most often is Vietnam. A worker there earns a fraction of our wage; a worker arriving from across our own borders will often accept what a South African cannot survive on. That is not xenophobia. It is economics, and pretending otherwise insults the people living it.

But notice where the comparison actually leads. Vietnam competes on low wages — and it also built the factories, the ports, the logistics, the export capacity that turned cheap labour into real employment. Some of that capacity was bought at the cost of rights I would defend to the last. But the variable that matters here is capability, and, on capability, we have gone backwards while they went forward. Wage competition does not explain why our unemployment is among the worst on Earth. The collapse of state capacity does.

The democratic promise of 1994 was never only the vote. It was inclusion — the belief that freedom would open into opportunity, dignity, a place in a growing economy. For millions, that promise is still unkept, and a body kept hungry and defenceless for 30 years will, under almost any shock, turn on whatever stands nearest. Right now, what stands nearest is the stranger.

There is something here the spreadsheets cannot measure. Even if every economic argument were settled, a moral question would remain. Scripture understands what modern politics keeps forgetting: how a people treat the stranger is finally a test of what kind of people they have become. Long before the violence reaches the street, something has already gone wrong in the soul of a nation — and it will not be set right by lighting another fire on another corner.

Gogo Dlamini — borrowing Thuli Madonsela’s phrase for the ordinary citizen whom the state exists to serve — is neither the migrant nor the politician. She is the one standing behind both of them, waiting for a state strong enough to protect them from each other. The deepest question facing us is not why South Africans are angry. The anger is understandable. The question is why the state has become so incapable of turning that anger into anything but smoke.

My mother deserved doctors who had something left to work with. Every Gogo Dlamini standing behind her deserved a state that did too.

A nation does not heal by attacking the people who reveal its weakness. It heals by repairing the weakness.

Until we recover the capacity to do that, we will keep burning the symptom and calling it a cure. DM