Xenophobia uproar in South Africa

by Alice Mpeshe

I don’t like getting into politics but please allow me to share one last piece about the recent xenophobia uproar in South Africa. I hope the world is willing to read this message and think deeply about it.

Why They Didn’t “Grab Opportunities” Before

Because they did not need to. The social grants worked. The economy was not great, but it was stable enough. Life was affordable. R200 bought groceries for a week. R370 bought food for a month. People were not desperate. They were surviving.

The grants were not a hammock. They were a floor. A person on the Child Support Grant or the Old Age Pension could feed their family, pay rent, and keep the lights on. They did not need to scramble for low-wage, high-exploitation jobs because they were not starving.

What Changed

The cost of living exploded. Food prices climbed. Rent doubled. Electricity became unaffordable. Transport costs ate up whatever was left. The grants did not move. The R370 that once bought a month’s groceries now cannot even cover electricity.

Suddenly, the floor collapsed. The people who were surviving found themselves drowning. They turned to the job market, desperate for anything. And they found that the jobs they had never needed before were already taken.

Who Took the Jobs

Not immigrants alone. But by the time South Africans became desperate, the low-wage, low-skill economy had already been filled by people who arrived earlier, worked for less, lived in shacks, and had nowhere else to go. Immigrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, Ethiopia. Many of them were also desperate. Many of them also had no other options.

But the difference is timing. They arrived when South Africans were still surviving on grants. They took the jobs that South Africans did not need yet. And by the time South Africans needed those jobs, the jobs were gone.

Why the Desperation Is Exploding Now

Because the grants that once worked no longer work. Because the cost of living that was once manageable is now crushing. Because the jobs that were once optional are now the only thing standing between a family and starvation.

The unemployment rate has been above 30% for years. But that number hides the real crisis: the number of people who have stopped looking for work entirely. Discouraged workers. People who have given up because there is nothing to find.

When those people re-enter the job market because their grants no longer cover the basics, they are not lazy. They are desperate. And desperate people do not care about the nuance of migration policy. They care about who is sitting in the chair they need to sit in.

The Role of the Immigrant Children

A child born in South Africa is a South African citizen. That child qualifies for the Child Support Grant, the foster care grant, and other social transfers. That money goes to the parent. The immigrant parent, who may not have legal status, now has a child who does.

The same grants that South Africans are fighting over are now being shared with the children of the people who took their jobs. The system did not plan for this. It just happened. And now the people who are already drowning see the same life raft being handed to the people who took their oars.

The Label of Laziness

The label of laziness is a lie. It is a convenient story that allows other countries to ignore why their citizens had to leave, allows employers to justify low wages, and allows politicians to avoid fixing the economy.

The evidence shows that grants actually increase job-seeking behavior. The R370 grant increases the probability of job searching by 25%. It gives people bus fare to interviews, airtime to send CVs, capital to start small businesses. The problem is not that people do not want to work. The problem is that there is no work to be found.

Over 70% of the unemployed have been looking for work for more than a year. That is not laziness. That is a structural crisis. The economy is not creating jobs. The infrastructure is crumbling. Load-shedding destroyed small businesses. Logistics failures strangled supply chains. Policy uncertainty drove away investment.

And through all of this, the grants that once kept people alive have been frozen while the cost of living has soared.

The world does not see the cause. It sees the violence. It sees the burning shop, the broken window, the angry crowd shouting “abahambe.” It sees the emotion and calls it hate. It does not ask why the emotion exists.

The cause is silent. The frozen grants. The cost of living that climbed while wages stayed flat. The jobs that disappeared while immigrants arrived. The children who compete for grants. The leaders who failed. The continent that empties into one country.

No one makes headlines about frozen grants. No one posts videos of a mother stretching R370 to feed her children. No one shares the silent math of survival. The world only sees the explosion. Not the pressure building. Not the valve failing. Just the steam.

South Africans are treated as the enemy because their desperation is loud. Their violence is visible. Their pain is expressed in screams, not essays. And the world, comfortable in its distance, judges the scream without translating it.