Let me be unambiguous: South Africans are not xenophobic.
We are a people who, through the long arc of our liberation struggle and the moral imagination of our constitution, chose to see the full humanity in others — even when the world refused to see ours.
That is not weakness. That is the product of a hard-won civilisation.
But civilisation, when mistaken for an open invitation, becomes something that can be exploited. And we have been patient long enough.
The installation of an Igbo king in KuGompo City was not a multicultural gesture. It was a provocation.
Our constitution’s protection of cultural life was crafted for a SA where all of us, regardless of race, ethnicity or origin, share a common stake in this democracy.
It was not designed as a framework for foreign nationals to assert cultural sovereignty over South African communities.
There is a categorical difference between a diaspora preserving its heritage and a community planting a flag in someone else’s house.
Visitors to this country, regardless of origin, are guests. Guests observe the customs of the home. They do not redecorate it.
But Dudula is a symptom, not the disease
Operation Dudula and “March and March” exist because the SA state has, in too many places, failed to do its job.
Police corrupted by the very criminal networks they should dismantle. Border posts porous by design.
Home affairs officials whose discretion can be purchased.
Deportation orders that exist on paper and nowhere else.
I am not endorsing Dudula’s methods — a nation of laws cannot subcontract border enforcement to street movements.
But Dudula is a symptom, not the disease.
The disease is lax government, timid leadership, and a political class more afraid of being called xenophobic than of serving the people who elected them.
We need firm, visible, unambiguous leadership — and legislation with precision.
The Road Accident Fund, financed by taxpayers through the fuel levy, is one example: undocumented foreign nationals who have contributed nothing to it should not be accessing its claims.
A legal immigrant, a documented refugee, and an undocumented illegal immigrant are not the same person and must not be treated as such. That is not cruelty. That is governance.
Now let us address something spoken in whispers: the moral debt argument.
Yes — African nations sheltered our liberation movement when apartheid hunted us.
Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Lesotho — they paid real prices, including military strikes on their own soil, for standing with us.
That solidarity was noble and we honour it without reservation.
But solidarity is not a financial instrument. It does not accrue interest across decades.
It carries no clause reading: in exchange, your borders shall remain open in perpetuity and your laws subordinate to our needs.
No such contract was signed, because no ethical act of solidarity demands one.
SA has repaid that gift many times over — in continental investment, in peacekeeping, in hosting millions who have built better lives here. We are grateful. We are not indebted forever.
To invoke liberation-era solidarity as justification for tolerating lawlessness in 2026 is to cheapen the very sacrifice being cited.
The leaders who sheltered Oliver Tambo were not doing so to secure future impunity for criminal networks. They were doing it for justice. Honour them by pursuing it.
The SA we are arguing for is not a closed country. We warmly welcome the Zambian doctor saving lives in our under-resourced rural hospitals.
The Nigerian engineer designing infrastructure that keeps our cities moving.
The Zimbabwean lecturer shaping the next generation of South African minds in our universities.
The Kenyan tech entrepreneur building startups that employ young South Africans.
The Congolese accountant, the Ghanaian architect, the Ethiopian economist — every highly skilled professional from across this continent and beyond who arrives legally, pays their taxes, obeys our laws, and contributes to our shared future. They are our African family.
Think of tax as the rent one pays for a country that provides courts, roads, hospitals and security.
Those who enjoy what SA offers while contributing nothing — or while profiting from the criminality that corrodes it — are not guests. They are freeloaders.
And the criminals among them, those who thrive precisely because their undocumented status makes them untouchable, must be removed. Firmly, lawfully, and without apology.
To those who have found in SA a kind of paradise: take what you have seen here and go build it at home.
The energy and ingenuity you have shown surviving on foreign soil — imagine what it could achieve directed at your own land and your own future.
Africa’s story is not complete while any African nation remains a place its citizens are compelled to flee.
SA cannot be the permanent pressure valve for the governance failures of an entire continent.
Go make your country worth staying in. We will cheer you every step of the way.
We owe the next generation a SA where the rule of law is not a suggestion, where borders are meaningful, where citizenship confers genuine protection, and where those who come to contribute are welcomed, while those who come to exploit are removed — not by street movements, but by a state confident in its own authority. That is not xenophobia.
Xenophobia is the irrational hatred of the foreign. What I am describing is the rational, earned, and deeply felt love of home.
We are not xenophobic. We are South Africans.
Those who come to add to what we have built are welcome. Those who come to diminish it are not.
And we will say so — with grace, without apology, and with the full conviction of a nation that has never needed permission to love itself.
Asanda Magaqa, founder & CEO, Citizen TV Africa
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