A nation that once fought against exclusion is now turning its anger on migrants from across the continent. In South Africa, migrants from Nigeria and other African countries have become targets of public anger and xenophobic violence. Durban’s Che Guevara Road sits outside the city’s Refugee Reception Centre. In recent weeks, dozens of foreign nationals have slept there on pavements and donated mattresses, too afraid to return to their homes.
Among them is Jeanne Nahimana, a Burundian refugee who has called South Africa home since 2003, now afraid to return to the neighbourhood she has lived in for over two decades. Her only comfort, she says, has come from food parcels supplied by charity. “We are scared,” she said. “We go to the toilet in the street.”
Scenes like this have become familiar across Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Durban in 2026. According to African Development Bank (AfDB) figures, South Africa holds the title of the continent’s second most industrialised economy. Yet by income inequality it also ranked among the worst in the world. This massive contradiction sits at the heart of the xenophobic anger playing out on its streets.
A nation that once depended on solidarity from across Africa during its struggle for freedom is increasingly turning hostile towards fellow Africans seeking opportunity within its borders. Yet in townships and cities, anger is aimed less at the economy than at immigrants accused of taking scarce jobs. So, when anti-migrant protests erupt and foreign nationals are accused of “taking jobs,” a deeper question emerges:
What evidence exists regarding claims that migrants contribute to crime, unemployment, or pressure on public services?
The Roots of Resentment
To understand the hostility brewing in South African communities you must look past nationality and into the conditions people are actually living in. The violent friction between locals and migrants did not start overnight. At its core, it is about poverty, unemployment, and a generation of South Africans who feel like they have been left behind.
Thirty years after liberation, millions of South Africans still live with the consequences of apartheid’s economic systems. Townships remain trapped with failing infrastructure and jobs remain very scarce. The official unemployment rate jumped to 32.7% in early 2026, according to Statistics South Africa (Stats SA). The broader figure, which includes those who have just given up, sits closer to 44%.
When people feel abandoned, faced with joblessness, and poverty they start to search for answers to why. When people lack running water and jobs, the neighbourhood shop or local factory becomes the target for attacks. As Mpho Makhubela of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA) explained to Human Rights Watch, vigilante groups like Operation Dudula effectively “feed off the country’s frustrations and socio-economic unemployment”.
Instead of addressing this massive equity gaps left behind by institutional racism, it is visually and politically easier to blame the shopkeeper from Nigeria or the mechanic from Zimbabwe. South Africa, Makhubela notes, is failing under “the enormous task of addressing the legacies of apartheid”. This hostile environment has also been charged by a deeper shift in the country’s political identity. Loren Landau, a research professor at the University of Witwatersrand, points out a long-standing theoretical tug-of-war within the ruling African National Congress.
On one side sits former President Thabo Mbeki’s Pan-Africanist vision, the idea that South Africa’s freedom was never just its own but part of a wider African liberation. On the other side sits a fiercer and more inward-looking “South Africa First” rhetoric that has been gaining traction. As economic pressures escalate, politicians have increasingly leaned into this inward focus to deflect from state corruption and budget collapse.
By framing crime and poverty as foreign imports, the state avoids accountability. However, experts urge a look at the data. Victor Oluwafemi, President of the African Development Studies Centre (ADSC), stresses that the root of organised crime and violence in South Africa is deeply “historical, structural and political,” rather than nationality driven. Criminological data supports this: violent crime groups are formed in the country’s deep-seated inequality, not cross-border migration.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has occasionally acknowledged these grassroots frustrations while warning against scapegoating migrants for systemic failures.
Speaking to civil society and political leaders, South Africa’s Justice Minister, Mmamoloko Kubayi, recognised the validity of public anger over severe socioeconomic conditions. However, she offered a stern warning against turning that frustration into unlawful, violent vigilantism.
At its core, the resentment is a devastating reality of displacement. South Africans are not fighting migrants because of where they were born; they are fighting them because a democratic government has failed to deliver the life promised in 1994. This then leaves two marginalised groups to battle over the remnants of a failing economy.
Why Migrants Are the Centre of Debate
Currently, South Africa’s economic failures in towns and inner cities are very visible and played out in the street corners where desperate migrants and locals compete for the same informal jobs, healthcare, and housing. Yet, as research from the Institute of Security Studies (ISS) and recent electoral data show, this localised panic has been amplified from above. As documented by organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, political elites systematically blame immigrants for collapsing infrastructure and state corruption. By manufacturing a visible scapegoat, the government successfully escapes public accountability from its own governance failures.
Additionally, several voices point to social media as an accelerating force driving this unrest. Moses Chanda, a Zambian entrepreneur based in Johannesburg, said that the violence often begins with rumours, “you hear people saying foreigners are taking our jobs and running illegal businesses” he explained, “then suddenly, shops are looted or people are attacked.” Outrage does not wait, and social media knows how to stir up tension. A clip of a Nigerian businessman being interrogated to leave the country has travelled faster than a Stats SA report.
He had run the business legally for 13 years, he said, paid his taxes, and held all the right permits, yet vigilantes asked him to vacate his shop. The numbers back this up. In a 2018 Pew Research survey, 62% of South Africans held negative views of foreign nationals, while 61% believed immigrants were more responsible for crime than other groups, with most citing them as a burden on jobs and social benefits. Political analyst Sandile Swana put the underlying dynamic bluntly, “There has never been any empirical evidence that the country is overrun by foreigners”
\What the Evidence Actually Shows
As it has been established, the evidence shows that migrants did not create South Africa’s unemployment crisis, neither did they build the economic system that continues to exclude millions from meaningful work. What the evidence reveals is that xenophobic violence is often the symptom, not the cause. It is the explosive result of unresolved economic grievances, deep inequality, and institutions that have simply failed to deliver on the promises of post-apartheid South Africa.
Nigerians have frequently borne the brunt of such accusations. Research presented by Victor Oluwafemi, President of ADSC, pushed back on this narrative. His study found that South Africa’s murder rate already stood at roughly 77 per 100,000 people in 1992, two years before democratic elections and well before any significant wave of Nigerian migration. Armed robbery rates exceeded 375 per 100,000 in the same period.
Oluwafemi concluded that the roots of organised crime in the country are not tied to any single nationality. However, other research complicates the picture. A separate account published by the University of Cape Town notes that some Nigerian criminal syndicates did become involved in crime after settling in the country, particularly from the mid-1990s onward.
Regional Fallout
The price of this crisis is not only South Africa’s price to pay. On 26 May 2026, Ghana organised evacuation flights for nearly 300 nationals fearing violence. Similarly, a plane carrying 268 Nigerians touched down in Lagos, Nigeria on Thursday11 June 2026 after departing from Johannesburg. Those on board were among the roughly 1,000 people who have now registered with the Nigerian consulate in South Africa, pleading to come home.
Two Nigerian deaths in April further pushed tensions when South African National Defence Force (SANDF) officers beat Amaramiro Emmanuel to death. Separately, after Ekpenyong Andrew was arrested in Pretoria, he was later found dead in a mortuary, according to Nigeria’s Consul General. Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu, accused Pretoria of failing to condemn this violence, calling it a betrayal of the solidarity Nigeria once showed during apartheid.
Goodwill is thinning, Nigerian police have warned against revenge attacks on South African nationals or businesses in Nigeria – proof of how fast a diplomatic relationship can unravel.
Living with Uncertainty
For migrants themselves, the debate is not theoretical. It is a decision they have to make about their own lives, often overnight. At Johannesburg’s Park Station, 30-year-old James Alan, originally from Malawi, told the Daily Maverick he was giving up on his street-vending business and heading home. “I do not have a choice, I am leaving,” he said. “We know what will happen. I think it is just safe for me to go home.”
Others, like an Ethiopian shop owner interviewed in Soweto, say they intend to stay and trust that legal residency and community relationships will protect them. Both men, who are living in the same country, are at different crossroads about whether it is still safe to call South Africa home. This is the real story underneath the noise. Not foreigners versus locals, but a country struggling with its own unemployment, inequality, and unfinished business from apartheid. A public conversation that keeps reaching for the easiest targets instead of the hardest truths.
That tension, between genuine economic grievance and a narrative that channels it towards foreign nationals rather than governance failures, sits at the heart of South Africa’s recurring migration debates. Until policymakers, civil society, and the public separate verified evidence from rumours, analysts warn that the cycle is likely to repeat. Not because South Africans hate foreigners, but because anger needs somewhere to go and blame is easier to find than solutions.
