Xenophobic-Denial

Competing for jobs sparks xenophobia - expert

SOUTH Africans see foreign nationals as unfair competition in finding employment, according to an expert at the Institute for Security Studies, Johan Burger.

He was responding to the recent protests in which shops belonging to foreign nationals were looted in Sebokeng and the surrounding areas.

Burger warned that as long as unemployment rates remained high amid a constant influx of foreign nationals to the country, it could spark xenophobia.

“Xenophobia is difficult to control, but the reality is that it won’t go away unless government does something.

“Unemployed locals feel that foreign nationals have an unfair advantage over them when it comes to getting the jobs available,” said Burger.

He also cautioned against the spate of service delivery related protests and violent strikes the country has been experiencing in recent years.

“Our government must seriously address issues of public discontent.

“The truth is there are many shack dwellers out there who are not happy with the way things have been going and who say there is a bigger potential threat to safety as well and we must be worried,” he said.

Burger said violent service delivery protests have increased by 1 600% over the last eight years.

“In 2011 alone, violent incidents were close to 80%, and we had 173 violent incidents reported last year,” he said.

Burger said there had also been a 23% increase in violent strikes in the space of a year.

“Once somebody start the spark, there will certainly be an explosion,” he said. 

– The Citizen

'Send foreigners to camps'

The Greater Gauteng Business Forum, an association of small shop owners, has told foreign businessmen trading in townships in and around Gauteng to "go back home".

Orange Farm, the neighbouring Sebokeng settlement, south of Johannesburg, and Diepsloot, north of the city, have all been hit by violence and looting that targets foreign owners of shops.

The association's chairman for the Tshwane region, Mpane Baloyi, said the government must stop issuing asylum permits to foreigners, or confine them to refugee camps.

"These people are not here because they have run away from their countries because they are in danger.

"They are here to destroy local business and people, particularly local shop owners, are boiling with anger.

"If nothing is done about this, there will be war," he threatened.

But Mpane denied that his group sought violence.

He said the association preferred to discuss with the government the effect the proliferation of foreign-owned shops had on local businesses.

"We have held a number of meetings with officials from the office of the Gauteng premier [Nomvula Mokonyane] and there has been a positive response.

"We have been trying in vain to secure an appointment with Home Affairs Minister [Naledi Pandor]," he said. Yesterday, 34-year-old Ethiopian Tegese Kenoro said he had to beg for his life while held at gunpoint at the Vukazchke supermarket, in Diepsloot.

About 20 people forced their way into the shop on Sunday night and stole R100000 worth of goods.

Kenoro, who lives at the supermarket, has been in South Africa for the past three years. He said he had been left with nothing but the clothes on his back.

"I am scared for my life but I have nowhere else to go.

"Everything is gone, I don't know how I am going to live my life," said Kenoro.

On Sunday night two men said to be looters were shot by a Somali shopkeeper.

Several foreigner-owned shops in the area have been looted. Many shop owners yesterday closed shop fearing more looting.

The police said calm had returned to the area, but police spokesman Colonel Lungelo Dlamini said the police would continue to monitor the situation.

He said that nine people were arrested in Diepsloot last night for public violence and possession of suspected stolen goods.

Ward councillor Abraham Mabuke said a meeting would be held today "to convince the public to accept foreign nationals in our area and to preach the spirit of ubuntu among the community".

The director of the University of the Witwatersrand's African Centre for Migration and Society, Loren Landau, said there was a possibility that the nation would have to endure more of the xenophobic attacks that blighted 2008.

Landau said the attacks were not spontaneous but co-ordinated at local level by ward councillors who stood to benefit politically, and by business owners who would benefit if foreign competitors were driven away.

"In almost every instance that we have examined, there is a political or economic incentive and at least some level of local organisation.

"It is not angry people waking up one day and making a decision. Someone stands to benefit from the violence," he said.

Since 2008, 320 people have been killed in xenophobic attacks.

- Timeslive

Orange Farm: Feeding the xenophobia beast

Orange Farm and Sebokeng are brimming with so-called xenophobic violence but the attacks are inseparable from other issues stalking these communities.

Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg, and the neighbouring Sebokeng informal settlement, are brimming with tension following so-called xenophobic attacks on foreign shop owners on Friday but the attacks are inseparable from a plethora of issues stalking these communities.

Chief among these is the competition for scarce resources, such as RDP houses and customers for informal traders, who must rely on a largely unemployed community for income.

On Friday, the recently launched Workers and Socialist Party (Wasp) organised a protest in Orange Farm against proposed evictions for illegal RDP owners.

The looting and pillaging that followed – and the driving out of foreign shop owners in the area – overshadowed that protest by far.

The events were almost identical to those of February 2010 when school children were involved in the looting of foreign-owned shops in Orange Farm, overshadowing another service delivery protest.

This time around, the unrelated protest was organised by Wasp, which denies having anything to do with the looting. But the party does recognise that Orange Farm is a community competing for scarce resources, and in 2010 – as in 2013 – it was in places such as Orange Farm where xenophobia was left untreated and to fester.

Looting

Gauteng police spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Lungelo Dlamini said the events began on Monday with a service delivery protest outside Sebokeng, a settlement that falls just short of the Gauteng border. Roads were blocked and the protest quickly spread to neighbouring Evaton and Orange Farm, about 20 minutes away.

Police suspect the roads were blocked in an attempt to prevent officers from accessing the areas where the looting took place.

By Thursday, the police advised foreigners in the area to leave and even helped some of them to pack up their shops and homes. (They have not returned to the area.)

Police also received information that schools would be closed on Friday so that children could participate in the protest.

That afternoon, shops in Sebokeng were looted and their foreign owners were run out of town. The looting soon crossed the Gauteng border and spread to Orange Farm where over 100 people were arrested. They will appear in court this week.

The incident had headlines screaming comparisons to the 2008 xenophobic violence, which left over 60 people dead and thousands displaced.

Xenophobic tone

Despite Friday's events taking on a blatantly xenophobic tone, Gauteng police cannot call them as such. One reason for this is that the shop owners were not physically attacked – they were merely chased away. Another is that the police simply don't know enough.

Dlamini said a local councillor met with looters on Friday evening to gauge the reasons behind the looting but the outcome was not relayed to the police – and the police did not inquire about it.

It was widely reported that the looting was inspired by the death of a Sebokeng resident, allegedly at the hands of a Pakistani national.

Dlamini said the police had no intelligence to this effect. There were no recent murders in the area, he said, and no Pakistanis recently became murder suspects.

Young people still lingering in the streets after the looters were arrested were unwilling to talk to the media, save to say that all Pakistanis were "rotten potatoes".

And then one young man let slip that, throughout the day, a rumour spread that the looting was instigated by a local shop owner who was unable to compete with the foreign shops' lower prices. At least, these were the speculations of a few teenagers, who stole the remaining merchandise inside the shops after the looting stopped.

Forced removals

The competition – for customers and the resources they spend on these informal traders' wares – extends to the competition for houses.

Sebokeng and Orange Farm were born out of apartheid's attempts to create settlements for the victims of its forced removals policies. Many residents remain homeless and allegations have surfaced that they are being forced to pay for RDP houses by corrupted local officials.

About two weeks ago, reports emerged that residents, frustrated by this, broke the locks of newly-built RDP houses and moved in.

Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille visited Orange Farm that day. She proposed her party's own solutions to the area's multitude of problems: chief among them was the promise that the party would implement the youth wage subsidy if elected in 2014.

The City of Johannesburg said progress was made at Orange Farm and Sebokeng, with an ICT hub and a mall established at both settlements. Houses have been built but hundreds of people still live in shacks, their names gathering dust on RDP waiting lists.

With jobs in the Johannesburg city centre more than 40km away, informal entrepreneurs thrive while others are left to look for work on the surrounding farms or in the mines.

Dlamini said the police are treating Friday's incident as criminal for now and they were not working with other governmental bodies to deal with the underlying causes. The only inter-state intervention taking place at the moment is an attempt by the police to assist a local councillor in arranging a place for the foreigners to stay at a local community hall.

Evidence of danger

The shop owners spent Friday night sleeping outside the local police station; broken windows in their ransacked shops were evidence of the danger they faced earlier that day.

For Wasp, the situation is not directly linked to the 2008 violence. But the recipe for xenophobic attacks is certainly there.

Wasp spokesperson Mamatlwe Sebei said that although the incident last week should not be seen as xenophobia, the current housing dilemma in the area would continue to create the right conditions for xenophobia to breed.

"Some of these RDP houses are owned by foreigners while some locals have been on the waiting list for years. It's a policy that Wasp opposes because we need to fight against all xenophobic tendencies in the working class," Sebei said.

At Orange Farm on Friday morning, the party joined in a protest around mooted plans for the eviction of residents who occupied RDP houses. Residents said government built around 1 000 RDP houses but that many of these were illegally sold to those who could afford to buy them and that their rightful owners were prevented from moving in.

About 200 of these houses are apparently illegally occupied. Residents have refused to vacate the houses unless the process is started afresh and the houses are transparently and fairly allocated.

Sebei said: "The government is doing nothing about the fact that those houses have been sold by the officials at the City of Johannesburg. All we hear is the typical political rhetoric, that the law must take its course – which basically means inaction on government's part."

Scarce resources

Sebei said the competition for scarce resources contributes to a climate where the have-nots are suspicious of the haves – especially when the latter are foreigners.

"When people are desperate and surrounded by crushing poverty and when they are told there are only a few houses for so many – only a few jobs – there is scarcity of resources created by capitalism and the liberal programmes of the government. Under these conditions, people are willing to believe lies spread about their 'competitors'– in this case, foreign nationals working in the area," he said.

For Sebei, community struggle is an essential pillar of the resistance to capitalism. Wasp wants a unified working class and says the labour unrest in 2012 actually showed that this was possible.

"Think about what happened in the mines in 2012: there are hundreds of foreign workers underground but we did not see xenophobic attacks there. It's an example of solidarity of the working class in the best traditions of the struggle against apartheid," he said.

The City of Johannesburg responded late on Sunday night.

Member of the City of Johannesburg's mayoral committee on health and social development, Nonceba Molwele said the city condemned the looting and cautioned against labelling the attacks as xenophobic. 

"Our initial analysis with Orange Farm residents disagrees with this perception. Communities largely blamed youth which acted in a 'not so cool' delinquent way. More hard work must be done to root out ignorance and all other forms of discrimination against fellow residents at Orange Farm and in general, citywide," he said.

Read the City's full response to the M&G here.

- M&G