From anti-immigrant protests and disinformation about a so-called “white genocide” to femicide, failing public services and growing public frustration, South Africa is confronting a dangerous question: who benefits when its people turn against one another?

If there is one lesson our struggle heroes understood, it is that oppression does not survive on force alone. It also thrives on division.

Apartheid was built on the principle of divide and conquer. The state institutionalised racial divisions, cultivated informers known as izimpimpi among comrades and fuelled conflicts that contributed to what became known as “black-on-black violence”. The objective was clear: weaken solidarity, fracture resistance and make it harder for people to unite against the system responsible for their oppression.

Decades into democracy, South Africa must confront an uncomfortable question: have we forgotten how division works, and are we watching history repeat itself in a different form?

The disinformation surrounding a so-called “white genocide” in South Africa, alongside anti-immigrant protests and growing hostility towards other Africans, are among the developments that, in my view, demand serious reflection. They point to a society increasingly vulnerable to narratives that encourage people to see one another as the enemy, even when many of their frustrations stem from the same underlying failures.

A divided society is easier to distract, easier to manipulate and harder to mobilise around shared interests.

South Africa’s anger is justified, but who is it directed at?

Let me be clear: the anger of South Africans is valid.

You would have to be remarkably detached from everyday reality not to understand the frustration of a taxpayer watching potholes evolve into mini-oceans, public spaces deteriorate into dumping grounds, crime grip communities and police visibility become a source of uncertainty rather than reassurance.

The list is endless. Unemployment, failing municipal services, corruption, inadequate infrastructure and the daily struggle to access basic services have left many people feeling abandoned by the institutions meant to serve them.

These frustrations are neither imaginary nor insignificant. South Africans have every right to demand accountability, safety, functioning municipalities and a government that responds to their needs.

But we must distinguish between legitimate anger and the targets towards which that anger is directed.

When frustration with governance becomes hostility towards foreign nationals, when neighbours become enemies and when people are judged by their names, accents, skin colour or appearance, we must ask whether our anger is producing meaningful change or simply creating new victims.

The question is not whether South Africans have a right to be angry. They do. The question is whether that anger is being channelled towards the people and institutions responsible for addressing the problems that have made daily life so difficult.

Anti-immigrant protests and the government accountability gap

Since anti-immigrant protests began dominating headlines, government officials have repeatedly been presented with opportunities to condemn xenophobia, Afrophobia and violence. These condemnations matter. No society can afford to normalise attacks on people because of their nationality.

But condemnation cannot be the entirety of a government’s response.

Where are the concrete, sustained interventions to address crime, unemployment, municipal decay, the failures of immigration administration and the public’s growing loss of confidence in state institutions?

Where is the evidence of consistent action that ordinary South Africans can see and experience in their daily lives?

Consider Johannesburg during the G20 period. The visible clean-up of public spaces and increased security demonstrated what coordinated government action can achieve when there is a clear deadline and international attention. It also raised a legitimate question about why similar standards of cleanliness, maintenance and public safety are not consistently experienced by residents.

The contrast invites scrutiny. If public spaces can be cleaned, roads maintained and security strengthened for a major international gathering, why should residents accept the deterioration of their neighbourhoods as inevitable?

The G20 preparations do not, by themselves, prove that every municipal failure is deliberate or that South Africa has sufficient law enforcement capacity in every community. They do, however, make it reasonable to demand an explanation for the difference between high-profile event readiness and the everyday delivery of public services.

International visitors were coming. The government had reputational stakes in ensuring that the country presented itself well. Security arrangements and visible public maintenance became priorities.

Yet South Africans live with crime and deteriorating infrastructure long after international delegations have departed.

Too often, public responses to violence appear reactive: a statement after a tragedy, a visit to a grieving family after a murder, an urgent intervention after a crisis has already unfolded. What citizens need is prevention, consistent enforcement, functioning institutions and measurable results.

South Africans should not have to wait for the world’s attention before their communities receive the care and protection they deserve.

Gender-based violence in South Africa: declarations are not enough

The same questions of accountability apply to gender-based violence and femicide.

South African women and children have endured sexual violence, abuse and murder for generations. Public outrage has repeatedly filled streets, trended across social media and forced the country to confront the scale of the crisis.

Yet the persistence of these crimes continues to expose the distance between political promises and the lived experiences of survivors and families.

During the G20 period, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the declaration of gender-based violence and femicide as a national disaster under the Disaster Management Act of 2002. The announcement brought renewed attention to a crisis that activists, survivors and families have been demanding action on for years.

But a declaration is not the same as protection.

What matters is whether such a measure translates into adequately resourced shelters, effective investigations, timely prosecutions, support for survivors, accountability for perpetrators and prevention programmes that reach communities before violence occurs.

South African women have been navigating the threat of rape, intimate-partner violence and femicide for decades. The country has witnessed repeated marches, vigils and national conversations, including the 2019 protests following the murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana.

The question, therefore, is not whether the crisis deserves recognition. It does. The question is what tangible change follows that recognition.

Why must it take another brutal murder, another grieving family or another national outcry for the urgency of this crisis to become impossible to ignore?

If government declarations are to mean anything, their impact must be measured in lives protected, cases properly investigated, perpetrators held accountable and fewer women and children exposed to violence.

Anything less risks turning public grief into a recurring political spectacle rather than a catalyst for lasting change.

Apartheid’s legacy and the dangerous politics of belonging

There is another uncomfortable dimension to South Africa’s anti-immigrant sentiment: the question of who gets to decide what a South African is supposed to look like.

We cannot claim to be defending South Africans while subjecting fellow citizens to suspicion, humiliation or violence because they do not fit someone’s idea of South African identity.

During incidents of anti-immigrant mobilisation, people perceived to be foreign have faced hostility. But South Africans can also become targets when others make assumptions about their nationality based on their appearance, language, surname or accent.

This is particularly disturbing in a country whose history should have taught us the dangers of allowing others to determine who belongs.

Under apartheid, racial classification and exclusion were instruments of state power. In a democratic society, we should be vigilant whenever belonging becomes something that ordinary people feel entitled to police through intimidation or violence.

We must also interrogate the language we use to humiliate people whose relationships cross national borders.

Take the term “Jollofina”, used to describe or mock women who date men from other African countries. Why does a woman’s romantic relationship become an occasion for ridicule because her partner is African and foreign-born? Why do comparable labels not carry the same cultural weight when South African women date European or American men?

The double standard deserves scrutiny.

It raises questions about colourism, class, cultural prejudice and the hierarchy through which some foreign identities are treated as more desirable or acceptable than others.

Anti-immigrant hostility cannot be understood only through the language of border control. We must also examine the social attitudes that determine whose presence is welcomed, whose relationships are ridiculed and whose identity is treated as inherently suspect.

A movement that claims to defend ordinary South Africans must also be willing to confront the class divisions and prejudices that exist within its own ranks.

South Africa’s protest history: from #FeesMustFall to the fight against femicide

South Africa has never been a nation that quietly accepts injustice. Protest is part of our democratic history, and the right to demonstrate remains an essential tool through which citizens demand accountability.

The #FeesMustFall movement mobilised students across the country over the cost of higher education. Women and allies took to the streets to protest gender-based violence, particularly during the national outcry in 2019. More recently, public attention has again turned to sexual violence against children, following allegations that sparked renewed demands for accountability and child protection.

These movements emerged from different circumstances, but they share a common thread: people who felt that existing institutions were failing to respond adequately to urgent social problems.

Their legacies are complex. The cost of higher education, gender-based violence and sexual crimes against children cannot be reduced to a simple claim that protest achieved nothing. Activism has helped force issues into national conversations and placed pressure on institutions to respond.

But neither should we pretend that public mobilisation automatically produces lasting change.

Students can march, survivors can speak, parents can demand justice and communities can fill the streets. Yet the deeper problems remain when policy commitments are not implemented effectively, institutions fail to act consistently and accountability is difficult to secure.

That is the frustration at the heart of this moment.

What happens when people repeatedly mobilise, raise their voices and expose injustice, only to find themselves confronting the same problems months or years later?

What happens when citizens begin to believe that peaceful protest is ignored, political promises are recycled and the institutions meant to protect them remain unresponsive?

We must take that frustration seriously. But taking it seriously does not mean excusing violence, looting, intimidation or the destruction of public property.

When people vandalise schools, post offices and other facilities, they risk destroying resources that their own communities depend on. When businesses are looted or innocent people attacked, the costs are borne not only by government but also by workers, families and vulnerable residents.

Desperation may explain why some people turn to destructive action. It does not make every action justified, nor does it absolve the state of its responsibility to address the conditions that fuel public anger.

The challenge is to build forms of civic pressure that are sustained, organised and difficult to ignore, without allowing frustration to become a licence to harm others.

Who benefits when South Africans fight one another?

This is the question at the centre of everything.

Who benefits when South Africans spend their energy fighting foreign nationals instead of demanding safer communities, functioning municipalities and accountable institutions?

Who benefits when citizens become so consumed by arguments over who belongs that they lose sight of the shared conditions affecting their lives?

Who benefits when people who should be demanding answers from those in positions of authority turn their anger on one another?

Division does not require everyone to be consciously manipulated. It can grow from genuine hardship, fear, prejudice, misinformation and years of disappointment. It can also be exploited by those who find it politically or socially convenient when public attention shifts away from structural problems.

That is why we must be careful about the narratives we accept, the claims we repeat and the people we choose to blame.

The disinformation surrounding a supposed “white genocide” is one example of why evidence matters. Serious claims about violence, persecution or threats to a population should be assessed against credible evidence, not amplified simply because they confirm existing fears or political beliefs.

The same standard must apply to claims about foreign nationals, crime and the economy. South Africans deserve honest conversations about immigration enforcement, employment, public safety and the pressures facing communities. Those conversations must be grounded in evidence rather than collective blame.

We can demand effective border management without dehumanising migrants. We can insist on the rule of law without taking the law into our own hands. We can challenge government failures without destroying the very communities we want to improve.

And we can acknowledge the suffering of South Africans without pretending that the suffering of people from elsewhere is less worthy of concern.

These positions are not mutually exclusive. They are the foundation of a society that takes both justice and human dignity seriously.

South Africa must choose accountability over division

I do not have a neat solution to the anger, mistrust and fragmentation confronting South Africa. Anyone who claims that these problems can be solved through a single speech, protest or policy announcement is underestimating their complexity.

But I know that we cannot afford to abandon the possibility of solidarity.

We need a government that treats service delivery as an everyday obligation, not an international public relations exercise. We need visible action against crime, credible immigration administration, accountable policing and a justice system that protects people regardless of nationality, gender or economic status.

We need meaningful implementation of commitments to combat gender-based violence, protect children and support survivors. We need communities to challenge xenophobia and misinformation without dismissing the real socioeconomic pressures that make people feel abandoned.

And we need citizens who understand that holding government accountable and protecting one another are not competing responsibilities.

We earned the right to participate in our democracy through immense sacrifice. That history should remind us that the vote, the right to protest and the freedom to demand accountability are not trivial privileges. They are tools we must continue to use, even when progress feels painfully slow.

The answer to government failure cannot be to turn against our neighbours. The answer to crime cannot be collective punishment. The answer to inequality cannot be a hierarchy of human worth.

South Africa’s history has already shown us what happens when division becomes a governing principle. We should not allow the wounds of that history to be reproduced through our own hostility towards one another.

Our anger must lead somewhere. It must lead to accountability, reform, safer communities and a democracy that works for the people who sustain it.

Otherwise, we risk spending our time fighting each other while the problems that brought us to the streets remain unresolved.

I do not know exactly how we reconcile the deep divisions confronting us. But I know that if we cannot find a way to rebuild trust, recognise one another’s humanity and direct our demands towards meaningful change, we will find ourselves drowning in even more kak than we are already in.

And by then, we may have done the work of dividing ourselves for those who never had to lift a finger to divide us.