The only inferences that can be made on Zandile Gumede's election as ANC eThekwini chair can be placed on the shoulders of our president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
Peaceful SA communities are reeling under the weight of hordes of criminal elements from some of our neighbouring states.
These immigrants come here with well-received sympathy but as soon as they settle down, start showing their true colours.
The case of Diepsloot shootings is a good example of a clear criminal gangster element having a free rein on our shores. Some of these criminals shoot people without taking anything from them, just to prove a point that South Africans are stupid and nothing will happen to these foreign gangsters.
People were just shot sitting on verandahs by known foreign gangs in Diepsloot and nothing was taken from them. Our media took the matter as a routine happening.
But when South Africans retaliated, journalists of all shapes and sizes were all over Diepsloot looking for the foreign victim. His identity was immediately sought in contrast to the identity of the mass victims of South Africans murdered earlier in that area.
I've never seen any name of the South Africans shot in Diepsloot, but I know of Elvis Nyathi's story in all its glory. The media even reports the underwear he was wearing to give their story an inch of sympathy of how he was disturbed while preparing to sleep. This has become a norm in SA's media corridors.
The media gets galvanised when South Africans retaliate against foreign criminals and jump to conclusions that it is xenophobic. Nyathi may not have been a criminal but the South Africans shot were not either, so why the one-sided sympathy? Journalists like SABC3's Chriselda Lewis were ripping cabinet ministers apart with unfounded accusations.
Two cabinet ministers visited the area and aptly put forward their observations, which were spot-on. People are not against foreigners but are against foreign criminals with no documentation to boot who easily melt away after committing serious crimes.
Unfortunately, Ramaphosa messed up the whole narrative by single-handedly giving South Africans a piece of his mind about the treatment of our uninvited guests.
Ramaphosa is a billionaire leader with all the security and perks a man of his stature can be afforded. What does he expect from ordinary citizens of his country when they are attacked a la the Russian-Ukraine situation sans a war in the comfort of their own homes? Does Ramaphosa have feelings for his own citizens or is he so afraid of his African counterparts at stoking the feelings of their brethren?
Must his own citizens suffer and die because he's afraid of a xenophobic tag? Why does the whole continent choose SA as their escape destination? It's because these foreigners messed up their own countries by playing an Africanist card of self-sustainability by chasing out whites in their countries only to find them here, and now they're asking for jobs from them.
Ramaphosa clearly angered a lot of people by supporting a foreign invasion but failing to protect genuine complaints from South Africans. His statement of equating police behaviour, against foreign document identification, to that of the apartheid-era was way out of order because police were not discriminating against foreigners but were merely seeking those who have no right to be here, and, who would commit crime and easily disappear into thin air without any trace.
What's wrong with that, Mr President? Were you not diminishing the commitment of your police force to maintain law and order in your own state? Does this not promote a failed state with impunity from a sitting president?
You've angered so many people my president, that it is my hard observation that you handed over power to alleged known miscreant Gumede, rightly accused of serious malfeasance in one of your metros.
It was a question of "if our president sees nothing wrong with foreign criminals, why should we see something wrong with our country's alleged criminals?"
• Mashaba is a Sowetan reader
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