The impact of leadership failures on migration and xenophobia in South Africa

AFRICA’S most pressing governance crisis today, which the African Union (AU) does not fully want to confront, is the mass displacement of Africans due to systemic leadership failures and the consequent erosion of Pan-African solidarity.

South Africa’s experience as the continent’s primary receiving nation illustrates the unsustainable nature of this crisis. For three decades, South Africa has absorbed millions of people fleeing collapsed economies across the continent, creating untenable pressures on its working class and the poor.

The data about migration reveals an alarming trend. Post-liberation governments have overseen the largest outmigration in African history, with economic refugees outnumbering those who fled apartheid’s political persecution.

Porous borders serve as pressure valves for failing states, allowing negligent regimes to export their governance failures rather than address them. In some cases, migration flows appear strategically convenient, depopulating their countries while the very migrants provide remittance lifelines to prop up faltering regimes.

The mass exodus of Africans from countries with mineral wealth and agricultural potential speaks to catastrophic leadership failures. South Africa’s experience as a primary receiving nation illustrates the unsustainable consequences of such displacements, having absorbed millions fleeing economic collapse elsewhere on the continent, social tensions characterised as xenophobia now threaten to undermine its developmental progress.

The situation recalls the worst colonial patterns, where African resources enriched the West while Africans suffered. Today, we see African elites enjoying extraordinary wealth in capitals from Abuja to Harare while their citizens become pariahs and another nation’s burden.

This constitutes not just governance failure but a betrayal of the Pan-African vision that guided liberation movements long before South Africa gained its independence. Africans are forced into exile by their leaders, who are failing to govern and hiding under the guise of Xenophobia and Colonialism.

Yes, we remember and acknowledge Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, Mozambique, Angola and others, they opened their doors to our exiles. While the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) stood firm against apartheid. For this, we are eternally grateful. But the bitter irony of post-colonial Africa is this: the men and women who fought alongside the ANC against apartheid have become the architects of governance systems more destructive than apartheid itself.

South Africa will never forget the solidarity shown to us during the anti-apartheid struggle by Africans. But gratitude cannot mean complicity in failure. Sadc, Ecowas and other regional elites preside over collapsed economies while amassing private fortunes, forcing citizens to flee to South Africa and elsewhere.

The AU’s silence has normalised this cycle; the consequences have turned Africans and the poor against each other instead of uniting them against the architects of their suffering. Just as the AU held the apartheid government to account for crimes against African people, I submit that contemporary African leaders whose governance failures have created comparable humanitarian disasters must face similar continental scrutiny.

The AU demonstrated moral clarity in holding apartheid accountable. Today, we face a comparable moral challenge: African leaders who, through gross mismanagement and corruption, have become the primary drivers of forced migration of their citizens, yet face no continental or global consequences. The mass influx of Africans to South Africa, in particular, is not migration; it is mass displacement by misgovernance.

Did the OAU hold the oppressive regime to account because they were White? Today, we face a crisis of comparable magnitude: the systemic failure of African governance that has forced millions to flee their homes, turning South Africa into the continent's primary receiving nation for economic refugees.  

African solutions for African problems cannot mean turning a blind eye on systematic injustices because it’s caused by those who look like us. South Africa currently hosts over 5 million documented migrants, with likely an equal number of undocumented migrants from across the continent.

South Africa has shouldered this crisis with remarkable patience, but the social and economic costs are unsustainable:

• Public health systems in migrant-receiving communities operate at 150-200% capacity, with clinics in Johannesburg and Limpopo townships reporting that 40-60% of patients are non-citizens.
• Schools in high-migration areas are dangerously overcrowded, compromising education for all learners.
• Recurring violence, which the AU terms Xenophobia, such as the 2008 attacks (62 deaths) and 2015 Durban riots, reflects the inevitable tensions when governance failures elsewhere go unaddressed.

This is not a crisis of South Africa's making. It is the result of systemic failures in migrants’ countries of origin, failures that the AU has allowed to persist without consequence. It is also public knowledge that black South Africans are still hewers of wood and drawers of water in the land of their forefathers. We do not own or control the economy, hence the inevitable fight for scarce jobs and resources.

Our people are still scrambling to make sense of this post-1994 democracy, which has retained wealth in White hands and the majority as workers at the mercy of capital.

Consequently, when Nigerian drug syndicates flood Cape Town with cocaine, when Somali warlords exploit porous borders to traffic arms, when Zimbabwean and Mozambican refugees commit the most atrocious crimes, South Africans cannot be expected to bear the brunt silently. As Zimbabwean journalist Manyowa elucidated: “We cannot escape that illegal immigrants commit crime in South Africa. People avoid talking about it, but the stats are there.”

Today, sending countries expect South Africa, with 40% unemployment and some of the worst crime statistics in the world, to absorb their displaced millions indefinitely. South Africa finds itself held hostage by the very leaders who once championed our liberation, governments whose catastrophic failures have turned our country into a dumping ground for their displaced citizens.

Where apartheid used overt racial laws to oppress, contemporary failures in Africa manifest through more insidious but equally destructive mechanisms: catastrophic economic mismanagement, wholesale looting of national resources, institutionalised corruption, and the deliberate collapse of public services.

The outcomes, however, bear tragic similarity: millions of Africans deprived of basic dignity and opportunity in their homelands. Nigeria, for example, despite earning over $1 trillion in oil revenues since independence, has seen its human development indicators stagnate or decline due to institutionalised corruption. The World Bank estimates that 63% of Nigerians live in multidimensional poverty, explaining the mass exodus of both skilled and unskilled Nigerians across West Africa and beyond.

In Lesotho, where over 40% of the population now resides in South Africa, their healthcare system has deteriorated to the point where maternal mortality rates exceed 1 000 per 100 000 births, a direct consequence of chronic underinvestment and governance failures.

Eswatini’s ongoing political crisis and economic collapse continue to create displacement waves, with security forces routinely targeting opposition strongholds, creating refugee-like flows into South Africa. This is a failed State with a wealthy monarch who has just recently agreed to host hardened criminals from the US for profit.

The less said about Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi, the better.

What Africans should also recognise is that the South African government with all its challenges has not weaponised this crisis and resorted to similar narrow nationalist antics such as the 1983 Nigerian expulsion of over 800 000 Ghanaians in what is now famously known as “Ghana Must Go” or the1969 Ghana’s Aliens Compliance Order which saw the Ghanian Goverment expelling thousands of Nigerians or the 2023 Tunisia’s racialised crackdowns.

The current situation represents not just a policy challenge but a fundamental crisis of Pan-African values. When citizens of resource-rich nations must flee to neighbouring countries to survive, when professionals educated at great national cost are forced to drive taxis in foreign cities, when children grow up knowing they are “foreigners”, we have betrayed the vision of our liberation forebears.

African leaders are beyond reproach. As Africans, we need equivalent measures against leaders who preside over worse human suffering than apartheid. Of course, failed African States are exporting their crises to South Africa and the Global North.

Where South Africa was once the crucible of anti-apartheid solidarity, it has now become the reluctant reception centre for victims of governance failures across our continent, a burden no single nation can sustainably bear without addressing root causes.

If the OAU could isolate apartheid South Africa for its crimes, the AU must now hold failing regimes to the same standard. The AU must adopt a comprehensive accountability framework in line with the aspirations of the OAU founding fathers, who aspired for a prosperous Africa and not one where leaders embezzle funds meant for development to feed their greed.

Our beloved South Africa, which opened its arms to Africans across the continent, now finds itself unfairly characterised as xenophobic when in truth, we are grappling with the consequences of systemic governance failures across Africa. The time has come to match our anti-Apartheid courage with contemporary accountability, not as punishment, but as redemption of the Pan-African promise.  

* Phapano Phasha is the chairperson of The Centre for Alternative Political and Economic Thought.

** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, IOL, or Independent Media.

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