Rabbie Serumula, author, award-winning poet, journalist. Rabbie Serumula, author, award-winning poet, journalist.
Image: File
South Africans have become very good at identifying criminals, as long as those criminals have accents.
The chant is now familiar. Mabahambe. Let them go.
Whether shouted at protests, typed into Facebook comments or muttered in taxi queues, the message is simple: undocumented foreigners are breaking the law and should leave South Africa.
It is a fair principle. Every country has the right to enforce its immigration laws.
But principles have a way of exposing hypocrisy.
This week, Gauteng police warned that South Africans who employ undocumented immigrants, or rent out their back rooms and spaza shops to them, could face fines of R10 000 for every illegal foreigner they harbour. It was a reminder that undocumented immigration is never a one-sided affair. Someone crosses the border, yes. But someone else opens the gate. Someone offers the job. Someone collects the rent. Someone pays cash because it is cheaper. Someone profits from the very illegality they publicly condemn.
The undocumented worker may be breaking the law.
But the employer or landlord is making that law profitable to break.
At almost the same time, another story dominated the headlines. Self-confessed fraudster Vusimuzi "Cat" Matlala reached a plea agreement that could see him become a state witness in one of the country's most significant corruption cases, provided the courts ultimately accept the agreement.
South Africans are understandably less interested in his sentence than in his mouth.
If he speaks, who falls?
More importantly, how many respected names will discover that corruption leaves fingerprints on everyone who touches it?
Matlala, if he testifies, will remind us that corruption never belongs to one man. It survives because it is hosted. Every fraudulent tender requires an approving signature. Every stolen rand requires someone willing to look away. Every corrupt network depends on respectable people making deeply unrespectable decisions.
Corruption, like illegal employment, does not survive on its own.
It needs accommodation.
That is why our national outrage often feels strangely selective.
We are quick to blame the undocumented worker picking fruit, mixing cement or washing dishes. Yet we are remarkably quiet about the South African businessman who hired them. We condemn the foreigner sleeping in the back room but rarely ask who handed them the keys.
Likewise, we speak of corrupt individuals as though they operated in isolation, when corruption is usually a team sport played in expensive suits and government offices.
Perhaps that is because it is easier to point at the outsider than to confront the insider.
As for Matlala, history has taught South Africans that those carrying dangerous truths often walk a difficult road before they reach the witness stand. Whether he ultimately testifies, and what he reveals if he does, may shape more than a criminal trial. It could expose an entire culture of permission.
Perhaps we have misunderstood the meaning of mabahambe.
Yes, those who violate immigration laws must face the law.
But so must those who employ them.
Those who collect rent from them.
Those who sign fraudulent contracts.
Those who sell state institutions to the highest bidder.
Those who profit while pretending to be outraged.
Because countries are seldom destroyed by the people trying to get in.
More often, they are weakened by the citizens who keep opening the door from the inside.