In an unprecedented show of force, thousands of South Africans took to the streets in many cities and towns on June 30 to highlight their frustration with the government’s failure to regulate illegal migration.
The overriding message from the protests was unambiguous: address this challenge now, or risk deeper social unrest.
For many South Africans, illegal migration is a matter of life and death — just as it is for the migrants themselves. Migrants expose themselves to the perils of exploitation, abuse and even death at the hands of unscrupulous companies and individual employers.
For locals, illegal migration robs them of quality municipal services, as they have to scramble with their foreign counterparts for whatever sparse resources are available.
While government officials and big business speak from their lofty positions, the widely held view is that it is the poor who bear the brunt of the state’s failure to regulate immigration. That is the uncomfortable truth that cannot be ignored.
The problems are starker in the outlying municipalities, where unemployment is alarmingly high and the collapse of essential services is abysmally shocking, from potholed public roads and a lack of potable water to sewage flowing in the streets. Successive reports by the auditor-general and Stats SA have flagged these issues.
Sections 152 and 153 of the constitution are unambiguous: municipalities are obliged to provide social and economic development and structure their budgets to give priority to the basic needs of communities to achieve a cohesive society.
This is not a suggestion. It is the legal foundation of local economic development. This is a tool meant to ensure that those who are historically excluded can finally secure a livelihood. How, then, does one explain the decision by the National Treasury to withhold R13.5bn in funding from 69 municipalities across all nine provinces?
Why does the law’s promise feel so distant from people’s lives? It is easy to dismiss protest as isolated anger. Contrary to popular belief, the 2021 looting in KwaZulu-Natal was not an aberration. It was a warning.
When malls were burnt and trucks torched, it was a revelation of a deeper despondency, the kind that festers when livelihoods are precarious, with 60% of the youth unemployed and entire communities depending on grants because the local and mainstream economies have no place for them.
If citizens had dignified work and real support for micro-enterprises to sustain families, then the urge to loot or march in rage would have no place. People protect what they own.
The township economy is estimated at R900bn a year, where activity is driven by informality and microenterprises. Townships are not grant-dependent voids, yet they remain unrecognised economic engines. The engineering of a democratic state 32 years ago promised inclusion, but still the national framework for local economic development remains unmeasured because, in many towns, it is not felt and remains abstract.
Watching the Madlanga commission and parliament’s ad hoc committee hearings confirms what many have always suspected: the rot is not only at the municipal level. Testimonies pointed to systemic governance failures, corruption and insatiable greed in the structures meant to ensure municipalities deliver on Sections 152 and 153 of the constitution.
We often blame ailing municipalities for lack of capacity, resulting in further decay. But how can they secure livelihoods when provincial and national oversight bodies are swimming in the same rot? As the adage goes, “A fish rots from the head.”
With local government elections due in November, citizens will be regaled with manifestos that promise jobs, while independent development plans continue to promise progress.
Yet on the ground, we see fatigue, not pride in ownership, because people are separated from the means to secure decent livelihoods. The anti-migrant demonstrations we witnessed are not just about current policies but also arise out of the neglect of local economic development.
If the government is serious about stability, it must stop treating local economic development as a buzzword. It is a constitutional mechanism for undoing the ills of the past and emancipating people. If we continue singing about unimplementable policy frameworks like local economic development, despondency follows.
If government truly belongs to the citizens, then Section 195 of the constitution is not a suggestion; it is an employment contract.
The absence of...accountability and integrity... has left communities desperate.
— Prof Bulelwa Maphela
Public servants must be accountable, transparent, efficient and put people first. Accountability cannot be a slogan trotted out during manifestos and conveniently forgotten once in office. It is the absence of that accountability and integrity that has left communities desperate, and desperation has been weaponised into the engineered “xenophobia”, which is not an instinctive South African identity.
It is time for the government to stop toying and start delivering. That means urgent, funded intervention programmes at the local level to address the plight of marginalised citizens. Unemployment is a problem, and it must be treated as such.
Citizens are able and ready to be part of this economy, but it appears only as a window of a distant future possibility.
When people get tired, any event that seems to offer hope will be appealing, including March and March. The question is, who is listening? It’s been two weeks now since March and March. The citizens are watching.
- Maphela is an associate professor in the school of economics at the University of Johannesburg.
Sowetan
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