It’s the economy, stupid! 

By Khanyile Mlotshwa

During a state visit to South Africa, as the March and March whirlwind started to tear across the country, Kenyan president, William Ruto, rightly agreed with his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, that the current migration crisis engulfing one of Africa’s biggest economies was an economic and resource distributional issue.

The two leaders both noted that the challenge can only be addressed through economic development, job creation and stronger continental institutions.

Addressing the media, at an event held at the South African state house, the two leaders said the migration pressure facing South Africa and other African countries stem from uneven economic development across the continent and require collective action rather than isolated national responses.

Authoritarian citizenship

The migration between South Africa and the rest of the continent has become paradoxical in that it is the citizen, rather than the State, that has emerged as the biggest challenge to freedom of movement in the continent.

While the challenge to freedom of movement has always been the border as enforced by states, in the anti-migration violence currently engulfing South Africa, the citizen has emerged as the strongest opponent of free movement with some vigilante groups representing the migrant as inherently a leper, bad, and evil.

In some spaces, citizens have described migrants in colourful language that compares them to animals and pests. Dogs are men’s best friends. For some citizens, migrants are less than dogs.

This is paradoxical in that, not only under the liberal present, but also under South Africa’s radical liberation history, as an ultimately free subject, the citizen is the ultimate embodiment of freedom and ‘the human’.  

South African citizen, Khulubuse Cele, a 54-year-old man who says he grew up in Zambia as part of the former liberation movement and ruling party, African National Congress (ANC) contingent in exile, recalls the conditions of unfreedom that subsisted under apartheid rule in his homeland.

“Under apartheid, our country was two countries in one,” he said. “There was a South Africa for the white citizens and another for the black people in the same borders. The cities were divided and unequal. 

“In our part of the city, we could not access good health and good education. It kept getting worse, until they planned Bantu education for us leading to the 1976 revolt. Still, it took us almost two decades to get to freedom in 1994, when we also became citizens of South Africa.”

Under apartheid, although their labour was needed, migrant labourers from the Bantustans – internal to South Africa – and from other colonies such as Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Nyasaland (Malawi) and Zambia (Northern Rhodesia), among others, were not welcome to cities and lived their miserable lives outside citizenship.

Under Prime Minister Daniel Malan’s administration, Black South Africans were denied permanent citizenship and basic political rights in the country as they were regarded as members of separate, ethnic homelands called Bantustans.

Black people living and working in urban, industrialized cities, regarded as “white areas,” were legally viewed as temporary migrants rather than permanent citizens denying them permanent residency, voting rights, and social welfare.

Apartheid’s unending hangover

The inequalities and separation have endured into the postapartheid moment.

In a speech at the Opening of the Debate in the National Assembly, on Reconciliation and Nation Building, at the National Assembly in Cape Town on 29 May 1998, four years into freedom, the then deputy president, Thabo Mbeki, said remedying the apartheid challenge was the biggest struggle for independent South Africa.

“We therefore make bold to say that South Africa is a country of two nations,” he said. “One of these nations is white, relatively prosperous, regardless of gender or geographic dispersal. It has ready access to a developed economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure.

“The second and larger nation of South Africa is black and poor, with the worst affected being women in the rural areas, the black rural population in general and the disabled. This nation lives under conditions of a grossly underdeveloped economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure.”

It is this disillusionment with independent South Africa and the persisting inequalities – more than thirty years into the freedom dispensation – that accounts for the anger of black South Africans, some of whom direct the anger to black migrants.

Ironically, it is disillusionment with independence – freedom – that has pushed most black Africans out of their countries to South Africa. 

Reflecting on xenophobia and how it devalues one’s sense of self, Thando Dube, a 35-years-old male migrant, said, ironically, what forced him to relocate to South Africa was the dehumanisation he experienced in Zimbabwe,

“In 2009, my salary was just not enough and I felt as if the company was exploiting me,” he said. “I could not take care of my wife and our two children. I did not feel like a man. I gave up on my country in 2010. I have been working here in Johannesburg and at least I can make ends meet.”

For Thando, freedom is to be human which is linked to a dignified life and his idea of work is a job that gives one enough salary to take care of one’s needs. 

Coming from Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland, a region that is seen as marginalised within the country’s politics, Themba Ndlovu, also a 35-years-old migrant, has a different kind of longing for dignity.

“My parents survived a genocide in Zimbabwe,” he said. “I have had personal experiences with being discriminated against based on who I am. I know what it feels like to have people from other parts of the country come and take jobs that you thought you could do. 

“I have also experienced discrimination in South Africa because I am a Zimbabwean. I always long for the day when people would regard each other just as people, not to have to wear this national tag of being Zimbabwean, Nigerian, or whatever all the time.”

Migrants in South Africa are blamed for taking jobs and other opportunities that are meant for poor black South Africans.

Mbongeni Mlilo, a 37-year-old male, came straight to South Africa after serving almost two years in a maximum prison for his political views in Zimbabwe.

“When I came to South Africa it was both a case of searching for political freedom and economic freedom,” he said. “Before I was jailed, I had gone for almost six years without a job. I was doing all sorts of part time jobs in construction that were not paying well. However, what made it urgent for me to come to South Africa as soon as I was released from prison was the desire for safety from political persecution. 

“There was a feeling among our colleagues that the eleven of us who had been jailed were not safe at all in Zimbabwe. What we had done to challenge the police at the notorious police station to release our leader was unforgivable to the regime. They could not kill us when we were under their custody in prison, but could try and kill us once we are back in our homes.”

While for Mbongeni freedom was about migrating from one country, as a political entity to another, for most migrants, in search of a job, migration is not necessarily to another country but to another economy. 

Capital’s freedom

The second reason why migration, under the neoliberal conditions subsisting in most of sub-Saharan Africa, has become paradoxical is the ease of movement of capital compared to that of humans.  

In their press conference in June, President Ruto and President Ramaphosa spoke in the context of bilateral trade between the two countries – one a giant in East Africa and another a giant in Southern Africa.  

While they referred to the movement of people – migration – as a challenge, none spoke of the movement of goods as a problem. However, each expressed a longing to increase the movement of goods and capital between their countries.

In 2023, Professor Chiara Cordelli, an academic at the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in the US, pointed out that, “while human mobility remains widely constrained across the world, free capital mobility is a loose governing norm of the current global economy, which is enshrined in several treaties.”

“Every day, trillions of dollars cross both residency and currency borders,” she said. “Against those who claim that capital ought to be freer to move than people, I argue that states have much stronger reasons, both of distributive justice and cultural integrity, to constrain capital movement than they have to restrict human movement. 

“Further, the case for restricting skilled workers’ right to exit their country in the case of brain drain is much weaker than the parallel case for restricting investors’ right to exit from a country that faces a threat of capital flight.”

President Ruto, put his finger on the pulse when he pointed out that competition for limited resources and employment opportunities was often at the heart of migration tensions across the continent. 

“I fully understand the people are competing for resources, people are competing for opportunities, and therefore it is important and imperative for us to create opportunities everywhere in our world, so that the people of this continent can move together,” he said. 

However, as much as President Ruto and President Ramaphosa were on point that the problem is the economy and not migration per se, they overlooked two issues crucial in addressing this.

First, what the two leaders did not make clear is that migration flows in Africa follow investment, that is capital migration.

In other words, migration patterns are mapped on the historical arc of colonialism. The intensity of colonisation in South Africa as a settler colony made it a nodal point for global capital. In South Africa, settler colonialists were invested in building the colony as home compared to some other African countries where infrastructure was put up to facilitate the shipping of natural resources from the colony.

Although resources were shipped from South Africa, its port cities like Durban, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, among others, were built to allow shipping of resources from the mostly inland colonies in Southern Africa.

The Witwatersrand Native Labor Association (WNLA), colloquially referred to as Wenela, which is the most deliberate effort at engendering migration by both capital and state, created South Africa, especially Johannesburg as the nodal centre for capital.

The Wenela programme encouraged movement by males and ensured that women remained at home, be it in the Bantustans or countries outside South Africa, engaged in the social reproduction labour.  

Freedom of movement, as movement of labour under subsisting capitalist conditions in Southern Africa is, therefore, historically, economic freedom. 

The Wenela interpellation continues

While under Wenela, mostly males were compelled to move to the mines in Johannesburg; ironically, under conditions of independence, both males and females were compelled to move by the need to access resources to reproduce their lives. 

Silibaziso Dube, a 48-year-old woman, born in Zimbabwe, speaks about this freedom to partake in migration as a woman.

“My grandmother could not partake in migration because only males could move back then,” she said. “My mother worked as a domestic worker – cleaning, cooking and washing clothes for white families – here in Johannesburg.”

Silibaziso said, although she was trained as a teacher, she worked as a domestic worker as well.

“I also work emakhitshini (kitchens) here in Johannesburg,” she said. “I chose to leave teaching back home and take up this job because, firstly, it is better paying, and secondly, I work in an economy that in some sense still works for most people.”

She described how when she left Zimbabwe, the country was struggling with unavailability of cash in banks, fuel shortages, food shortages and “supermarkets were even selling firewood rather than food.”

“While it might look like I was exercising my freedom when I left Zimbabwe, I was in a way compelled into this decision to move,” she said. “I was compelled by the deteriorating situation back home.”

Munashe Shoniwa, a 38-year-old woman, also from Zimbabwe, who left her job as a clerk in the civil service, said, although they had to bear with anti-foreigner sentiments in the country, Johannesburg created an “illusion of choice.”

“I am talking about basic stuff such as buying bread in the morning,” she said. “There is a choice here in Johannesburg depending on price, flavour or, even, sentiment. That is not there at home. The pricing back home is crazy. 

“There are difficulties here and there. Serious difficulties such as accessing papers, and when you don’t have access to papers, you struggle to access certain jobs and even social services such as health. However, we can always find ways around that.”

The Kenyan leader, Ruto, acknowledged that South Africa was one of the continent’s more developed economies, making it a destination for people seeking jobs and services.

“You and I discussed the whole subject about migration and the need for us to provide opportunities in our country. I think part of the challenge we are facing [is] because South Africa is a much more developed country, therefore it’s easier for people to come here for services and to seek for opportunities,” he said.

Migrants are just following jobs that citizens also want

The second point that the leaders missed is that the movement of capital and goods is the movement of jobs that people later follow.

President Ruto alluded to the imbalance in terms of trade, pointing out that South Africa exported a lot of finished products to Kenya than its East African counterpart exported to the Southern economy.

What this means is that the factories and jobs are in South Africa for goods that are consumed in as far as Kenya.

In Southern Africa countries such as Zimbabwe, once regarded as the bread basket of sub-Saharan Africa, Mozambique and Botswana have been characterized as nothing but open supermarkets for South African manufactured goods.

The Kenyan leader, President Ruto, linked the migration debate to ongoing efforts to reform the African Union (AU), saying a stronger and more effective AU could help create conditions that reduce migration pressures.
“The President and I agreed that a fit-for -purpose Africa Union will help create solidarity between countries, so that we can provide opportunities for our citizens and avoid unnecessary, you know, competition over resources and over opportunities that sometimes result in the kind of challenges that we have,” he said.

Khanyile Mlotshwa is an accomplished Zimbabwean researcher, academic, and print journalist. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN) in Pietermaritzburg. For the 2025/2026 academic year, he was a fellow at the University of St. Gallen Collegium, Switzerland, whose theme was Re-thinking freedom.