Families flee South Africa's violence; experts warn regional instability feeds migration c

Hundreds of thousands of people have already voted with their feet. Over 178,000 migrants, most of them from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi, fled South Africa amid a wave of xenophobic violence that drew international condemnation and prompted Ghana to demand the attacks be placed on the agenda of the next African Union summit. For the families who packed up and left, the political arguments playing out in Pretoria’s parliament buildings are not abstractions. They are the reason people keep moving.

That reality landed squarely in Parliament this week when Democratic Alliance MP Ryan Smith challenged President Cyril Ramaphosa directly, asking when South Africa would confront what he called the “backslide of democracy in our region and the growing threat of authoritarianism and state collapse that is placing the burden of mass migration on South Africa’s doorstep.”

Additional reference context is available at https://issafrica.org/iss-today/sa-can-t-tackle-migration-while-ignoring-zimbabwe-s-democratic-backsliding.

Ramaphosa’s answer leaned on sovereignty and process. Governance problems in other countries, he said, belong to their citizens to resolve. South Africa works through the Southern African Development Community (SADC), where member states collectively determine responses to regional challenges. It was a careful answer. It was also, critics argue, a revealing one.

SADC’s record suggests that deference to sovereignty has become a shield for inaction. The organization’s consensus-based approach has left it unable or unwilling to confront democratic regression across its membership, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Tanzania, Eswatini, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Madagascar.

Zimbabwe makes the pattern plain. A decade and a half ago, SADC-brokered diplomacy under South Africa’s leadership produced a unity government that temporarily stabilized the country after hyperinflation reached 79.6 billion percent monthly and the Zimbabwean dollar collapsed to one trillion to the US dollar. That intervention brought hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans back from the brink of flight. The unity government lasted from 2009 to 2013. It ultimately allowed former president Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party to consolidate power after losing the 2008 elections to Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change.

Today Zimbabwe has returned to square one. ZANU-PF operates as a de facto one-party state, having systematically repressed or dismantled opposition movements. In July, President Emmerson Mnangagwa pushed through what opposition figures called a “constitutional coup,” an amendment extending his presidency by two additional years and positioning him as a president-for-life. The people who would bear the consequences of that move are the same people who have been crossing borders for years.

SADC has offered no meaningful resistance. The organization has actively discouraged reform by opposing Western targeted sanctions against Zimbabwe and endorsing ZANU-PF’s narrative that sanctions, not misgovernance, caused the country’s economic collapse. At the SADC summit this month and at the Zimbabwe-South Africa Bi-National Commission Business Forum in Pretoria, Mnangagwa publicly thanked SADC and South Africa for their support against what he called “stupid illegal Western sanctions.” The remaining sanctions, for context, are narrow: the European Union restricts only equipment exports that could be used for internal repression, while US financial sanctions and asset freezes target Mnangagwa and a handful of political leaders and business associates.

By contrast, the personal relationship between Ramaphosa and Mnangagwa has grown conspicuously warm. The two lead parties that meet annually as an informal club of former Southern African liberation movements, gathering to exchange strategies on remaining in power. Last year, Mnangagwa advised fellow leaders: “We should never allow ourselves to lose power.” In May, Ramaphosa made an unexplained visit to Zimbabwe that included a detour to Mnangagwa’s farm, where he met controversial business figures including Wicknell Chivayo and Kudakwashe Tagwirei. Ramaphosa’s office could not adequately explain the visit. Zimbabwe’s opposition privately speculated that financial arrangements for the ANC’s local government campaign were being negotiated, or that Ramaphosa was endorsing Mnangagwa’s term extension. Others suggested Ramaphosa was counseling against it. If so, the advice left no visible mark.

At recent regional forums, Mnangagwa has repeatedly called Ramaphosa “my younger brother,” and Ramaphosa has reciprocated by calling Mnangagwa “my elder brother.” That familiarity points to a shared interest in power retention that makes credible pressure on democratic governance difficult to imagine.

Pretoria, seeking to avoid AU scrutiny over the xenophobic violence, has pushed for a continental conference on migration focused on the “push and pull factors” that drive people to leave their home countries. In naming those factors, South Africa has inadvertently invited the question it now struggles to answer: what responsibility does it bear for the governance failures that make those countries uninhabitable in the first place?

As an analysis published by the Institute for Security Studies notes (issafrica.org/iss-today/sa-can-t-tackle-migration-while-ignoring-zimbabwe-s-democratic-backsliding), SADC’s consensus-based approach has systematically prevented it from addressing democratic regression in member states, even as ambitious plans for regional economic integration require stronger governance foundations. Migration pressures mount, xenophobic backlash spreads, and the families caught between collapsing states and hostile host communities are left to absorb the cost of decisions made, and not made, at the top.

Whether South Africa will eventually use its regional influence to press for the governance reforms it publicly identifies as root causes of migration, or whether the brotherhood of liberation-movement leaders will continue to take precedence, is the question that will shape the lives of ordinary people across southern Africa for years to come.