Rabbie Serumula, author, award-winning poet, journalist.
Image: File
Julius Malema may be discovering the cost of being right too early. Or perhaps the cost of being consistent.
As anti-illegal immigration protests gather momentum across parts of South Africa, a noticeable shift is taking place in public discourse. It can be heard in taxi ranks, on radio call-in shows, in community meetings and, perhaps most revealingly, in the comment sections beneath news articles and social media posts.
The mood is changing. Most political parties are moving toward some version of "South Africans first". The ANC increasingly speaks of illegal immigration as a security concern linked to porous borders. ActionSA has built significant political capital around immigration. MK Party supporters often echo similar sentiments.
Meanwhile, the EFF continues to defend a recognisably Pan-African position. That creates an intriguing political question: is Julius Malema standing on principle while the country moves elsewhere, or is he defending an idea whose time has not yet come? Yet the real story is bigger than the EFF.
Twenty years ago, complaints about immigration were often confined to the political margins. Today, they have entered the mainstream. The language differs from one community to another, but the sentiment is increasingly familiar: South Africa cannot save Africa while struggling to save itself.
Not long ago, Pan-Africanism was spoken of as an extension of the liberation struggle. The freedom of South Africa was tied to the freedom of the continent. Africans were brothers and sisters separated by borders they never drew.
Today, many South Africans are asking different questions.
Who gets the job? Who gets the RDP house? Who gets the hospital bed? Who gets the place in the classroom?
The liberation imagination is continental. The empty refrigerator is local.
That tension may prove to be one of the defining political questions of our time. To be clear, none of this is to suggest that illegal immigration is not a legitimate concern. Every sovereign state has the right and responsibility to manage its borders and enforce its laws. The challenge is that border management and Pan-Africanism are increasingly presented as opposing ideas when they need not be.
The EFF's position is rooted in a tradition stretching from Robert Sobukwe to Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere. Sobukwe's Pan-Africanism was never an argument for disorder. It was an argument against the artificial divisions imposed upon Africans by colonialism. Yet politics has a habit of colliding with reality.
South Africa is not debating Pan-Africanism from a position of prosperity. It is debating it while facing unemployment, failing municipalities, collapsing infrastructure and growing economic insecurity.
When people feel secure, they think in terms of ideals. When they feel threatened, they think in terms of survival.
Perhaps that is why immigration has become such an emotionally charged issue. Foreign nationals have become the visible face of frustrations whose roots lie elsewhere. Corruption, state failure and economic stagnation have no single face. They cannot be stopped at a roadblock or removed in an operation.
But migrants can. What if South Africans are not rejecting Pan-Africanism because they misunderstand it? What if they understand it perfectly well but no longer believe they can afford it?