Africa Day: Foreign nationals being used as scapegoats
“People are fighting foreign nationals, people who have been excluded or forgotten by their governments. Our government is failing to own up to its failures and mistakes in creating jobs, securing the borders and having efficient policing. In their rhetoric they scapegoat foreign nationals,” Mavundla said.
In 2018, then health minister Aaron Motsoaledi blamed the overcrowding of hospitals on foreign nationals. He said: “The weight that foreign nationals are bringing to the country has got nothing to do with xenophobia … it’s a reality”.The researcher said that people should be focusing their anger towards government instead.
“There’s this tendency to go for the low hanging fruit. Rather than dealing with racism, dealing with the fact that we haven’t healed from apartheid, we haven’t received the justice that we were promised, or dealing with colonialism as the prelude to apartheid, it is much easier to blame the foreign nationals,” Shange said.She said there was strength in South Africans working together with foreign nationals through ubuntu to tackle the challenges they face.
“If we can root ourselves in our humanity, in our ubuntu, then we can definitely start to resolve some of the challenges we face within our communities. We need discussions and discourse around what the real issues are. We also need to start to engage with other Africans, engage them on what brought them to this country and learn more about each other,” Shange said.
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