Nkosikhona "Phakel'umthakathi" Ndabandaba of Insizwa Nobunsizwa has said action to deal with illegal immigration will continue.
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The fight to remove illegal immigrants will intensify in Durban in the coming weeks, with organisers of the anti-illegal immigrant marches stating that they plan to work with the police to evict illegal immigrants and remove them from each and every building in Durban that is housing them.
Nkosikhona "Phakel'umthakathi" Ndabandaba of Insizwa Nobunsizwa briefed the public yesterday on the next steps following a highly successful march on Tuesday. The Insizwa Nobunsizwa organisation, together with the march led by Jacinta Ngobese Zuma and Ngizwe Mchunu, has been leading anti-illegal immigrant marches across the country. These efforts culminated in a national shutdown on Tuesday, which was the deadline for all foreign nationals in the country illegally to leave.
The briefing detailed the next steps for the ongoing campaign, the meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa, and the tensions that the meeting created, especially since Ngobese Zuma was not part of the meeting and the work to place South Africans in jobs.
Phakel'umthakathi stated that the march on Tuesday is just one of many that will be taking place in the coming weeks and months. He added that they also want to move beyond just marching and are now looking to operationalise their activities.
“One of the areas that we are going to be putting immense pressure on is the city of eThekwini. We are going with the police to each and every building that has been identified as housing illegal immigrants. We are going to be taking the police to those buildings and demanding that they remove the illegal immigrants that have taken them over. We know that some of those buildings were taken over by immigrants with the help of city officials because those buildings belong to the Department of Public Works. How would the immigrants have known that the buildings were vacant? Someone told them.
“It was not enough for the immigrants to take over those buildings just because they wanted a place to stay; they instead became landlords and rented out those buildings to make a profit without paying for water and electricity. What we are now going to be demanding is that those buildings must be rehabilitated and made available to accommodate the South Africans that have been displaced by the floods. The South African people placed there must also continue not paying for water and electricity as the foreign nationals had been,” he stated.
He mentioned that another town that will be focused on is the town of Stanger (KwaDukuza), stating it was a disgrace.
Phakel'umthakathi also spoke of the controversy that arose following the publication of the picture of him, Ngizwe Mchunu, and President Ramaphosa, which emerged just hours before the June 30 march took place. Addressing the issue, he said this was not a sabotage or snub of Ngobese Zuma, and the meeting was not about taking money from the president.
He stated that while he does not account to the leaders of the other groups, he holds Ngobese Zuma in high regard. “When Ngobese Zuma first held her march in Durban, I came down and supported her because she is my sister. In the meeting with the president, it is inaccurate to say that we had gone to meet with the president and left her out; that is simply not true.
“I was invited by the president on that day. As someone who is invited, I cannot call someone else to invite them to a meeting that I had been invited to. If the president had wanted Ngobese Zuma there, they would have called her. I was called to that meeting because the day before, the president had met with King Misuzulu, who gave him an assurance that as I would be leading the march, there would be no violence.
“The president asked for a meeting and asked us if we could postpone the march, and I told him that it was not possible to do so. He asked me to give the assurance that there would be no violence or mayhem, and I assured him of that.”
Phakel'umthakathi also touched on the job opportunities, saying the campaign to remove illegal immigrants from the country was paying off and claimed that by the end of the year, the campaign would have created about a million jobs. “That will happen in one simple way: by companies removing illegal immigrants and filling that position with a South African national,” he said.
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