As South Africa grows more volatile, migrants face a relentless squeeze—caught in a grinding crisis shaped less by sudden catastrophe than by the steady erosion of protection, options, and hope. (This article is the final part of a two-part series on how leadership failures and broken promises have left migrants vulnerable across Southern Africa.)
By Themba Khumalo
In northern Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, waves of violence have forced hundreds of thousands from their homes since 2017.
Entire communities have been uprooted with little warning, as attacks by armed groups continue to destabilise the region.
For many, displacement is not a one-off event but a recurring ordeal—families move from one temporary shelter to another, each time hoping for safety that remains elusive.
In December 2025, UNHCR reported that nearly 100,000 people had been displaced ‘in recent weeks’ as violence spread across northern Mozambique — language that reflects surges happening quickly enough to overwhelm local coping mechanisms.
Two months earlier, UNHCR had warned that renewed violence had forced 22,000 people to flee ‘in a week’ — and its representative described the surge as ‘a turning point’ for the north.
These are not tidy movements with paperwork and planned destinations. They are families pushed out by fear, into camps, into overcrowded towns, into whatever shelter exists.
And when displacement becomes long-term — when camps become semi-permanent, and assistance runs short — the journey often continues. People search for stability. Some head south. Some aim for South Africa.
The chain between Cabo Delgado and Johannesburg is not direct for every person. But the regional pressure is real.
Eswatini: when the state answers protests with force, and accountability stalls
Eswatini’s crisis is sometimes treated as too small to matter regionally. That is a mistake.
The 2021 unrest and the state’s response became a warning sign for how quickly a political dispute can slide into fear — and how difficult accountability can become afterwards.
In October 2025, Human Rights Watch stated that there had been ‘no justice’ for the June 2021 security force violence, and pointed to continuing disputes about the death toll — with civil society groups believing the number killed may be over 100, while official processes have been criticised as insufficient.
The Institute for Security Studies has also described a political environment in which ‘security forces continue to carry out illegal detentions and torture against protest leaders’ — language that does not come from activists shouting into the wind, but from a mainstream African policy institute tracking a crisis that refuses to close.
SADC’s own posture in Eswatini has often been framed through the language of dialogue and mediation. A Reuters report in 2021 noted SADC’s statement that the king was ‘open to dialogue’ after protests — the kind of phrasing that sounds comforting, until you ask: dialogue with what consequence if abuses continue, and who enforces it?
For ordinary people, that question is not theoretical. If a state can survive scandal, survive protests, survive allegations of brutality — and still carry on — the lesson is harsh: power is protected.
And when people feel trapped, movement becomes an option.
The Tribunal that was cut down
The sharpest symbol of Southern Africa’s accountability retreat remains the SADC Tribunal saga.
South Africans sometimes forget this because it sounds like a legal argument. It is not. It is about whether an ordinary citizen has anywhere to go when the state fails them.
In Law Society of South Africa v President of the Republic of South Africa, the Constitutional Court found that the president’s role in suspending the Tribunal, and signing a later protocol weakening it, was unlawful and unconstitutional. (SAFLII)
What matters here is the consequence: individuals across the region were effectively stripped of a regional route to justice at the moment it became politically inconvenient.
So when SADC later observes an election and says it “fell short”, the public has every right to ask: and then what?
Because observation is not enforcement.
And without enforcement, repeat crises become normal — until people move.
Voices from the ground: fear, anger, and the lived reality of being blamed
The biggest failure of many public debates about Afrophobia is that they treat the subject as a fight between slogans.
But the people inside this story are not slogans.
A Zimbabwean woman described her terror during anti-foreigner tensions in South Africa with a simple line: “I thought I was going to die that day.”- (Africanews)
That is not an argument. It is a human being speaking from memory.
On the other side of the street, South Africans who join anti-immigrant movements often frame their anger as a survival claim, not ideology — saying foreigners take jobs, take space, take opportunities. Such claims are repeated at protests, and the language is easy to weaponise because it rides on real hardship.
The state has periodically condemned vigilantism. In 2022, Reuters quoted President Cyril Ramaphosa warning against ‘vigilantism’ and saying: “We cannot allow a situation where people take the law into their own hands.”
But condemnation is not the same as prevention.
And the absence of credible enforcement — whether against violence, extortion, labour exploitation, or organised intimidation — leaves space for the worst actors to set the tone.
Crime, Perception and Collective Blame
In the scrublands of inner-city Johannesburg and its suburbia, a different kind of story plays out—one that dismantles the neat narratives of victim and villain.
In the past few years, South African authorities have repeatedly uncovered human trafficking rings operating in and around the city. In January 2025, the Gauteng Hawks arrested three men after rescuing 26 Ethiopian nationals who had escaped from a house in Sandringham where they were believed to be held against their will. Some had broken through windows and security bars to flee — a desperate bid for freedom that neighbours described as shocking and inhumane.
Around the same time, police also found 44 Ethiopian men locked inside a house in Parkmore, Sandton.
In January 2026 in Mulbarton, south of Johannesburg, the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks) said investigations led to the arrest of a 47-year-old foreign national in the Johannesburg CBD following the rescue of 10 teenage boys.
Police said the boys were found wandering in distress, and the case was investigated as suspected human trafficking.
The suspect later appeared before the Booysens Magistrate’s Court on charges including contraventions of immigration legislation and trafficking-related offences.
These cases are stark reminders that criminal exploitation exists — that syndicates will operate under the cover of marginalisation and vulnerability, moving people without consent or dignity.
In 2025, South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Justice Andries Nel reaffirmed the state’s stance on human trafficking, emphasising that any suspected case must be investigated swiftly to “protect vulnerable individuals, preserve evidence and disrupt networks before they can adapt or relocate.”
There are also examples with broader criminal conviction outcomes. In September 2025, a Johannesburg court sentenced seven Chinese nationals to 20 years each for trafficking 91 undocumented Malawian workers and forcing them into labour under oppressive conditions in a factory in Village Deep. Prosecutors said the victims were misled with false job promises and kept under guard in dangerous conditions before their rescue.
Taken together, these events underline an inconvenient truth: some of the criminal activity South Africans associate with “foreigners” is real — and in some cases, it is perpetrated by migrants or by networks that prey on migrants.
But here is the critical nuance: Law enforcement data and independent analysis do not support the idea that migrants are responsible for most violent crime in South Africa. In a comprehensive review, the Institute for Security Studies noted that while there are undoubtedly crimes committed by foreign nationals, there is no evidence that the most serious crime in Gauteng or nationally is committed by migrants.
In fact, if arrests of undocumented migrants truly targeted the core drivers of violent crime, overall murder and robbery rates would have declined — but they have not.
Experts stress that focusing on nationality rather than conduct can mislead both public safety strategies and public opinion.
If you missed Part 1, read it here: Migrants Trapped In Peril
Speaking from the ground, some migrants themselves acknowledge that problematic behaviour within their communities exists — but they place it in context. Research with migrant groups in South Africa has found that activities such as street-level drug hawking or petty crime often stem from lack of legal status, unemployment and exclusion from economic opportunities; they are survival behaviours driven by desperation, not inherent criminal intent.
That distinction matters for a few reasons: It recognises real harm where it occurs — including trafficking, exploitation and illegal labour networks. It refuses to reduce an entire community to the actions of a few. It pushes the conversation back towards law enforcement and governance, rather than collective blame.
As one civil society attorney put it when discussing community tensions in Hillbrow and elsewhere: “The frustration isn’t that migrants exist — it’s that crime targets everyone, South African and foreigner alike. Stopping violence against vulnerable people requires lawful policing, not mob justice.” – (from reporting on policing dynamics in Johannesburg)
The danger comes when spikes in crime — whether connected to foreign nationals or not — are used to justify or incite collective punishment against all migrants. History shows that once a community is labelled a threat, the threshold for violence drops rapidly — and the law becomes an afterthought rather than a shield.
Why Afrophobia keeps returning
Here is the uncomfortable finding that a forensic, measured feature has to land:
Afrophobia in South Africa is not only a moral failure. It is also a structural collision.
It happens where three forces overlap:
- Local scarcity — jobs, housing, services, safety.
- State failure — weak policing, weak labour enforcement, corruption, and broken trust.
- Regional accountability failure — instability, repression, disputed elections, and conflicts that drive movement, without consequences strong enough to stop repeat cycles.
South Africa then absorbs people, pressures, and politics — and, too often, directs its rage at the nearest bodies rather than the systems that created the heat.
The hard conclusion
If we want Afrophobia to stop, we do not start with slogans. We start with accountability.
- Accountability inside South Africa: prosecutions that move, not drift; visible consequences for organisers of violence; enforcement against labour abuse that fuels resentment; a state that is present in the places where anger is most easily recruited.
- Accountability in the region: SADC that does more than observe and recommend; AU principles that are enforced beyond coups; credible mechanisms that make rights violations costly for those in power, not only embarrassing.
Because if the region continues to produce instability without consequence, and South Africa continues to absorb the pressure without fixing its own fractures, the pattern will repeat.
The fires die down. The anger does not.
And the next “pressure point” moment will arrive, as it has before — not because anyone planned it, but because too many systems have learned they can fail without paying the price.