March and March has been running campaigns across South Africa and has “set a deadline” of 30 June for illegal immigrants to leave the country. In doing so, the little-known organisation has the country on tenterhooks. Businesses have indicated their intention to close on the day of the “deadline”, which really is an indictment on the state. In general, we cannot believe that it can keep us safe from violence.
March and March has also declared its intention to detain suspected undocumented migrants through so-called citizens’ arrests. The organisation (in the loose sense of the word) is headed by its founder Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, who alone is named on its website.
It is styled as follows: “March & March emerged as a grassroots citizen movement addressing growing concerns about undocumented immigration in South Africa. What began as conversations among communities affected by issues related to illegal immigration, employment competition, and access to public services, evolved into an organized advocacy movement.”
Their core principles, according to their website, are “the rule of law”, “community accountability”, “transparency” and “citizens-first advocacy”. It has therefore comfortably appropriated the language of constitutionalism while simultaneously stoking fear within communities and subtly (or not so subtly) instigating a fear of the “other” in towns and cities.
Several of its protests have turned violent. In KwaZulu-Natal, which appears, perhaps predictably, to be the hotbed of xenophobic activity, thousands of migrants have rushed to deportation centres fleeing violence in informal settlements.
It is the threat of untrammelled violence which many now fear, partly because of the July 2021 insurrection (for that is what President Cyril Ramaphosa called it at the time). Several reports this week have indicated that these protests, rather than being about illegal immigration, may have a more sinister motive: to break the state. Several reports also allege March and March ties to Jacob Zuma or those close to him. The Zuma political project, after all, simply keeps trying to revive itself; octopus-like, its tentacles are spread far and wide.
Our government has floundered in the face of this artificial deadline imposed by an organisation whose leader has made several claims about illegal immigration that are not backed by evidence.
Ramaphosa addressed the nation, warning against people taking the law into their own hands. He has also written a “letter to the nation” in which he rightly points out, “South Africa is a constitutional republic governed by the rule of law. The exercise of rights by any citizen in a constitutional democracy cannot be determined by intimidation, threats or ultimatums. It must be determined through democratic institutions, evidence and the rule of law.”
Weak and unconvincing
Yet businesses will close and millions of rands in economic activity will be lost because of these threats of violence. So, while the President’s words matter, they are, like his very Presidency, weak and unconvincing.
Further, some of his ministers are not helping matters, allowing March and March to control and lead the discourse on immigration and the power to police it. The minister of justice, Mmamoloko Kubayi, said (rather meekly, when asked about citizens’ arrests and in keeping with the President’s tone): ‘The law allows a private person to arrest someone without a warrant only under specific circumstances, including when a crime is committed in their presence, when there is a reasonable suspicion that a serious offence has been committed, when a suspect has escaped from lawful custody, or when the arrest is carried out at the request of a police officer.
“Upon effecting a citizen’s arrest, a person is legally obliged to hand the suspect over to a police officer, or take them to the nearest police station, as soon as possible.”
The home affairs minister, Leon Schreiber, was present at a makeshift repatriation site in Durban where thousands were seeking to leave South Africa, fearing for their lives.
While acknowledging that everyone had the right to be treated humanely, Schreiber also said, “We’ve had one person already arrested who’s wanted for rape of a minor. We can’t allow people to just get a blank cheque and evade justice.”
That provided more unfortunate fodder for the xenophobic amongst us. Illegal immigration has always been illegal, to state the obvious. Yet, government ineptitude and acquiescence have allowed a situation where thousands are in South Africa illegally, many unable to access assistance to legalise their status.
A complex challenge
Dealing with that challenge is now multifaceted and complex. It is simply not practical to deport millions of individuals, many of whom work in our service industries and most of whom are not, in fact, criminals. Creative policy solutions and added state capacity are thus needed to deal with such individuals. Instead, we have seen mobs driving people out of their homes, women and children sleeping in inhumane conditions, fearing for their lives. Are these, as Ferial Haffajee wrote elsewhere, “children of a lesser God?”
But, while we seem to have reached another boiling point, this xenophobia is not new. And it is found too in the very heart of Ramaphosa’s Cabinet and his party. While district mayor in Beaufort West, Gayton McKenzie (now a minister in the GNU) vowed to make the Central Karoo an “illegal-immigrant-free zone”, sending shivers down the spines of the Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Ethiopian communities.
Many senior ANC politicians have not been afraid to use xenophobia as cover for their own governance failures. In 2022, Phophi Ramathuba stood at the bed of a Zimbabwean patient who had been involved in a car accident, in a hospital in Bela-Bela, Limpopo, and said: “You are killing my [sic] health system.” Ramathuba was MEC of health at the time. It was a shameful scene, and even while the cameras rolled, Ramathuba showed very little care. When these words were followed by an outcry, Ramathuba insisted she would not apologise. Defiant and callous, yet despite this, Ramathuba was elevated to premier of Limpopo. So, xenophobia pays, it seems.
When illegal miners were trapped inside a mine in Stilfontein in 2024 with no help forthcoming, the response from Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, made national and international headlines when she said, stone-cold: “You want to send our law enforcement officers to risk because criminals want to destroy our country? What if we send the police or military down there to supply them with food, the place explodes and caves in, what will happen? So families must continue to sacrifice because criminals got themselves into a bind?”
It ran on, with Ntshavheni saying the government would not send help. “We will smoke them out”, she said, without understanding how objectionable her words were.
Operation Dudula (now registered as a political party that has set its sights on the upcoming local government elections, which will surely be another flashpoint) is another example.
It gained prominence on the streets, especially after its leader, Nhlanhla “Lux” Dlamini, was arrested in 2022. Operation Dudula brought with it violent language and has enticed those at the margins of our society with its facile solutions to complex problems of unemployment and inequality. The intricate links it has forged with certain politicians were almost inevitable.
In 2025, Operation Dudula took it upon itself to police the entrances to hospitals, stopping migrants from entering — it did so illegally and often using force. However, where physical force was absent, it was the violence of the language of “them and us” that was continually employed. Operation Dudula announced its intentions to target schools to “put South Africans first”.
We have seen xenophobic violence spread to Johannesburg and further afield at various intervals. Truck drivers routinely “protest” against the hiring of foreign drivers. We also remember 2008 as a frightening time when the “Burning Man” was depicted in the front pages of local and international newspapers.
Xenophobic violence has resulted in burning and lawlessness.
As with everything else in South Africa, the reasons for violence are complex. Our inner cities and towns have long been places with discontent simmering at the surface. Yet, in the typically South African way, we have chosen to ignore the degradation and depravity.
Sometimes it has been driven by xenophobia, and at other times a rather confusing cocktail of anger, frustration and intolerance bubbling at the surface of our society. Fuelled by exclusion, poverty and rampant unemployment, the environment is ripe for blaming “the other” while competing for scarce resources.
Populist exploitation
At the heart of the incendiary rhetoric lies populist exploitation. This is not unique to South Africa. We have seen it in Donald Trump’s presidency and recent re-election campaign and the arguments for Brexit.
When we read of Operation Dudula or of Gayton McKenzie’s populist rhetoric, and we watch the hunting down of foreigners who are often beaten and labelled, and when the logic presented is that “they are taking our jobs”, and when our government is slow to condemn violence against migrants, then we need to see the blame game that is unfolding and to understand too that such populism seeks simple solutions instead of grappling with complexity and, in our case, doing the hard work needed for a growing economy and a dent in the unemployment numbers.
Hate and blame are far easier than building and working, after all.
That we have had successive ANC-led governments and now an ANC-led GNU, which have repeatedly failed to lead a society in which the most vulnerable are given dignity, that we have a country where the rule of law is under serious threat and makes criminality commonplace, only fuels xenophobia.
Actions mostly don’t have consequences in South Africa. After all, those who looted and burned in July 2021 during the insurrection walk free, and those who instigated the burning of our Parliament remain free too.
It is this bitter dividend which has spawned despair and ugliness in equal measure. There must now surely be a renewed realisation of precisely how dangerous the tinderbox of societal inequality has become.
So the xenophobic rhetoric, its violence, our propensity towards breaking down and our inability to prefer reason over slogans and violence, leave us with the question: After we speak violence and stop migrants from entering our hospitals and schools, what is left?’
Who builds after we tear down?
It is hard to find the answers in such incendiary circumstances, and sometimes we can only lament for the future of our country.
We understand fully what the historian and activist Rebecca Solnit means when she says: ‘‘You can feel terrible and remain committed, be heartbroken and know the future is being made in the present.”
We still long for a country free of incendiary rhetoric, one which practises the ubuntu towards all who want to live and work here legally and which allows proper state-led legal processes to deal fairly with any illegality, whether by citizens or non-citizens.
Whatever happens this week, we need as a society to fully understand and act against the forces of hate, division and chaos that simmer beneath the surface of our constitutional democracy. These forces seek to exploit the deep inequality that marks our society and keeps it straining at the seams. How to respond is a policy question but also a whole-of-society endeavour: Who are we? And do we choose this democracy and rule by law, or do we prefer self-help by the mob threatening to drive out those who are “other”? DM