By Thebe Ikalafeng *
Tomorrow, 30 June, South Africa faces a day of reckoning it could have avoided. A number of fellow Africans have been queuing at airports, bus stations and border posts, trying to leave ahead of a deadline that began, extraordinarily, with a fake poster. Someone generated an official-looking Department of Home Affairs notice, declaring that all undocumented foreigners must leave by that date. The government never issued it. But it went viral, and it gave the March and March movement something it did not yet have: a date. A moment. A match thrown into dry grass.
What began as scattered demonstrations has evolved into a nationwide mobilisation. The organisers insist it will be peaceful. But the buildup has already caused intimidation, unrest and mass displacement among migrant communities across the country. Government says it is ready to protect the migrants and assert law and order.
The date will come and go. But the harder question will remain: Not how many people were deported, but what kind of country, and what kind of continent, produced this moment in the first place. And where to from here.
The State Built the Crisis
The migration crisis does not begin at Beitbridge or in the informal settlements of Tembisa. It begins in the heart of the state. On 23 February 2026, South Africa’s Special Investigating Unit delivered its findings: the country’s immigration system had been compromised and treated as a marketplace where permits and visas were sold to the highest bidder. The scheme generated more than hundreds of millions in illicit gains. Visas were sold for as little as $35. The border, offered for sale by the very institution mandated to protect it.
Millions of fellow Africans fleeing the same conditions that haunt South Africa’s own majority: poverty, joblessness, state failure – flooded the country through this broken system poured. For them, the last African nation to win its freedom, a freedom made possible by the solidarity of the continent, was their last hope. To them, the debt of solidarity was never adequately honoured, and the systems that should have managed the resulting movement were corroded from within.
South Africa’s citizens meanwhile were still waiting for the economic freedom promised in 1994. Official national unemployment rose to over 30% in the first quarter of 2026. Among those aged 15 to 24, it reached 60%. White South Africans, 7.3% of the population, still own approximately 72% of privately held agricultural land, while the majority of black South Africans, over 80% of the population, remain locked out of individual land ownership thirty years after liberation. The state, meanwhile, cannot keep the lights on, cannot staff the clinics, nor prosecute its own officials.
That is the architecture of this crisis. The African migrant who bears the brunt of this anger, did not build it. He is its fellow victim.
Even as Africa fielded ten teams at the FIFA World Cup for the first time, with nine of them reaching the knockout stages, a unified continental fury directed at South Africa saw many Africans cheering against Bafana Bafana rather than with them. The rage is real and understandable. But it is aimed at the wrong address. The Zimbabwean waiter did not write the 1913 Natives Land Act. The Somali shopkeeper does not set JSE interest rates. Politicians who moved anti-migrant rhetoric from the fringe to the centre of national politics share direct responsibility for what has followed. When a government behaves lawlessly, it does not produce a law-abiding society. It produces its own reflection.
This is Africa’s Problem, Not South Africa’s Alone
What is happening in South Africa is not unique. It is the continent’s most visible expression of a pattern that has repeated for six decades without consequence.
In 1969, Ghana expelled an estimated 200,000 Nigerian migrants under its Aliens Compliance Order. In 1983, Nigeria retaliated by expelling approximately two million undocumented workers, more than half of them Ghanaian, in two weeks. In Côte d’Ivoire, the legally codified concept of ivoirité excluded descendants of migrants from political life and culminated in civil war. There have been eleven successful coups across the continent since 2020, the highest concentration in any comparable period since the Cold War. Sudan is now the world’s largest internal displacement crisis, with 9.1 million of its own people displaced in 2025 alone. The DRC displaced 9.7 million in the same year, the highest figure ever recorded for a single country. Every person crossing a border in desperation is the product of a government that failed them first.
The pattern is always the same: a government fails its citizens, the citizens move, the receiving country eventually turns on the arrivals. And when the anger flares, countries issue travel advisories, evacuate citizens and the African Union issues a statement.
The AU Must Now Answer
Ghana rightly petitioned the AU to place South Africa’s crisis on the AU’s agenda for its next summit. South Africa must be censured. What happened is a continental embarrassment that demands a formal continental response: two Nigerian nationals killed, 130 citizens repatriated, six African governments issuing formal travel warnings. As Ghana’s High Commissioner to South Africa, Benjamin Kofi Quashie, put it when the first repatriation flights departed: “The responsibility of every government is towards its citizens, in Ghana and everywhere.” It is not a diplomatic formulation. It is a statement of first principles. When governments abandon that responsibility, citizens pay the price.
But censuring South Africa and moving on would be the AU doing precisely what South Africa’s government did for decades: treating the visible symptom while leaving the wound open. The summit owes the African people a genuine reckoning with why desperate Africans are moving in the first place. The Free Movement Protocol, adopted in 2018, remains unratified by the majority of member states. Agenda 2063 promises integration and prosperity. The gap between that promise and the reality is measured in bodies and repatriation flights.
A continent-wide migration framework with binding obligations and real consequences is not an ambition. After 63 years, it is the minimum expectation.
Law and Humanity Are Not in Conflict
South Africa has every right, and every obligation, to manage its borders. President Ramaphosa’s recent address committed to dedicated immigration courts, accelerated deportations and intensified workplace inspections. Those are legitimate steps. The March and March movement’s core grievances about porous borders, unemployment and crime are not fabricated. They are a precise description of what a failed state produces.
But enforcement and humanity are not in conflict. The Malawian toddler denied treatment at an Alexandra clinic in July 2025 because his family lacked documents had committed no crime. The Ghanaian shopkeepers in Estcourt whose keys a mayor confiscated and handed to South African traders in April 2026 were not criminals. They were victims of a state that had weaponised its own lawlessness against the very people it was constitutionally bound to protect.
The 30 June deadline will pass. Some people will have left. Others will remain. The jobs will not have appeared. The cost of living will not have fallen. The clinics will not be better staffed. The officials who sold the border for R500 a visa will not yet be in court. And the next March and March will already be taking shape.
South Africa’s citizens are right to have had enough of lawlessness and inept governance. But they are aiming, too often, at the wrong target. The criminals are not the migrants. They are the officials who sold South Africa’s sovereignty one permit at a time, the politicians who exploited the resulting rage for electoral gain, and the continental body that has watched this pattern repeat for six decades without once demanding accountability from the governments that produce it.
The real test is not whether South Africa can march or deport its way out of this crisis. It is whether the AU has the courage to inspire and build a continent where no African feels compelled to flee in the first place. If it cannot answer that question, then 30 June is not a deadline. It is a preview.
*Thebe Ikalafeng is Founder and Chairman of Brand Africa, Chancellor of Sol Plaatje University, Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg Business School, and author of The Traveller: Crossing Borders and Connecting Africa and Rooted and Rising: Reclaiming Our Culture and Redefining Our Global Influence.
