Nigeria has become the latest African country to repatriate citizens from South Africa as anti-migrant agitation and xenophobic violence continue to escalate. A flight carrying 268 Nigerians landed in Lagos this week, part of a larger group of around 1,000 people who have registered to leave. Ghana, Zimbabwe and Malawi have already organised similar evacuations.
The immediate target of public anger is migrants. The real source of the crisis is capitalism.
South Africa is facing unemployment above 30%, chronic underinvestment, failing public services, and extreme inequality. Yet instead of directing anger toward the capitalist class that controls the country’s wealth, sections of the media, politicians and far-right agitators have spent years encouraging people to blame migrants for social problems they did not create.
The pattern is familiar.
Workers in Britain have watched the same story play out for decades. Every housing shortage, NHS waiting list, school funding crisis or jobs crisis is eventually blamed on migrants. The tabloids and far right insist that if only migrants were removed, prosperity would return. Yet living standards continue to fall, housing becomes less affordable, and public services remain under pressure regardless of how many migrants arrive or leave.
The reason is simple. Capitalism creates these crises.
A system organised around profit rather than human need inevitably produces unemployment, underinvestment and social decay. Migrants didn’t privatise public services. Migrants didn’t hand wealth to monopolies. Migrants didn’t create mass unemployment. Migrants didn’t build an economy where a tiny minority owns vast wealth while millions struggle to survive.
As Nigeria’s Consul General in South Africa, Ninikanwa Okey-Uche, pointed out, migrants make up less than 10% of South Africa’s population and cannot be “blamed for broken systems in education, health care, policing, unemployment”.
“They are not and cannot be the problem. So, migrants are basically being scapegoated,” Okey-Uche said.
Scapegoating is exactly what is happening.
Marxists have long understood that ruling classes benefit when workers are divided against one another. Instead of recognising their common interests, workers are encouraged to see fellow workers as competitors and enemies. The capitalist who pays poverty wages disappears from view. The landlord who extracts rent disappears from view. The corporations hoarding wealth disappear from view. Attention is redirected toward the migrant worker trying to survive.
This division is particularly tragic in South Africa.
After the defeat of apartheid, many people from across the African continent moved to South Africa seeking opportunities in the continent’s largest industrial economy. They arrived not as conquerors or exploiters, but as workers, students and families hoping for a better life. Today many find themselves facing intimidation, violence and demands that they leave.
One Nigerian man, Justin, who has lived in South Africa since 1998, described the atmosphere of fear.
“I’m leaving because of the conditions they’ve given us here. They say we must leave on or before 30th June. And because of the way they are killing people, killing our brothers, so I’m not safe.”
He also described being attacked.
“Recently they attacked me in a taxi. I ran away and left my things. I left my phone and everything.
“They call us names and say you must leave this country. When we tried to beg them, they started insulting us.”
The parallels with Britain are impossible to ignore.
Years of anti-migrant propaganda from politicians, media outlets and far-right organisations have repeatedly fuelled racist violence. Pogrom-like attacks on migrant accommodation and asylum housing have not emerged from nowhere. They are the predictable result of a political environment that constantly tells working people that migrants are responsible for problems created by capitalism.
South Africa is travelling down the same road.
The timing isn’t accidental. Local government elections are due later this year, and migration is increasingly being transformed into a campaign issue. Rather than addressing unemployment, poverty and inequality at their source, sections of the political establishment are finding it easier to promise crackdowns, deportations and harsher border controls.
President Cyril Ramaphosa recently announced new measures targeting undocumented migration, including dedicated deportation courts, biometric registration systems and penalties for employers who hire undocumented workers.
Yet no amount of deportations will solve the fundamental contradictions driving the crisis.
South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies on earth. A tiny elite controls immense wealth while millions face unemployment and insecurity. The problem is not that too many workers crossed a border. The problem is that the wealth created by workers is monopolised by a small ruling class.
The wider imperialist context matters too. Capitalist underdevelopment across much of Africa did not emerge naturally. It was produced through centuries of colonial plunder, unequal exchange and imperialist domination. The same system that drives people to migrate then blames them for migrating.
Workers in South Africa, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Malawi and beyond share common interests. They face the same exploitation by capital, whether they were born in Johannesburg, Lagos or Harare. The answer to unemployment and social crisis is not xenophobia, deportations or vigilante violence. It’s working-class unity against the system that produces poverty and division in the first place.
The people attacking migrants aren’t fighting the cause of their misery. They’re fighting other victims of it.
And that’s exactly what the ruling class wants.
