The logic displayed by police minister Bheki Cele in saying mere criminality is to blame for this week’s attacks on foreign nationals is hard to follow – and is being strongly questioned by Nigeria’s angry Foreign Affairs Minister. Overseas media reports overwhelmingly view xenophobia as to blame, whatever its causes. Early local introspection reveals ‘born frees’ seemingly ignorant of the ANC’s deep historic struggle-debt to other African countries and their peoples. – Chris Bateman
By Thulasizwe Sithole
While not on the level of the final surge of civic unrest in the dying days of the apartheid regime, the ongoing and intermittent killing of foreigners and looting of their informal businesses is becoming sickeningly commonplace, with no possible moral justification. That’s the thrust of the New York Times coverage and background reporting about this week’s killing of five people and the arrests of 189 in Johannesburg and Pretoria.
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President Cyril Ramaphosa has roundly condemned the violence and unlike his police minister, Bheki Cele, called it by its name; xenophobia, saying it’s completely against the South African ethos and predicting potential counter-attacks against South Africans in other African nations. As we’ve since come to know, there’s been at least one violent retaliatory attack on a Shoprite outlet in Nigeria with the supermarket group taking strain with foreign-national protests locally and elsewhere on the continent.
Cele continues to rule out xenophobia, putting the attacks down to criminality, earning the scorn and disbelief of the international community, given the trend of hostility towards and attacks on foreigners earlier this year – and previously.
The NYT cites a recent report by the African Centre for Migration & Society, which has monitored attacks on foreigners in South Africa since 1994. This report says that xenophobic violence is a “longstanding feature in post-Apartheid South Africa.” Cele might be right in saying criminals are using the general intolerance of foreigners as an excuse for criminal behaviour, but the media ridicule centres on him denying that it is xenophobia.
Johannesburg’s Mayor, Herman Mashaba, is quoted as saying the attacks were exclusively on shops owned by foreigners. A Gauteng police spokesman, either following Cele’s lead or unable to formally identify the dead, is quoted in the NYT as being ‘unwilling’ to identify them or their nationalities.
Nigeria’s foreign affairs minister, Geoffrey Onyeama is seething, accusing South African police of being ineffective and threatening to take ‘definitive measures.’
What gives the NYT story added valence is the scheduled visit to South Africa next month by Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari, who will meet with Ramaphosa to thrash out these rising tensions. Meanwhile a media snapshot of an outraged South African woman standing in the charred rubble of a looted foreign spaza shop angrily decrying the behaviour of her compatriots helped mitigate the overwhelmingly negative coverage.
