LUCKY MATHEBULA | South Africa’s democracy is being tested at the extremes

When a state fails its citizens, migrants become the scapegoats and the constitution becomes the target.

South Africa is becoming a democracy of extremes. In one week, communists may celebrate Red October as proof that the constitutional order has accommodated ideology; the next, the Constitutional Court may defend access to the asylum system and provoke fury among citizens who believe the same order has forgotten them. This contradiction does not prove that the Constitution has failed. It is evidence that politics has failed to translate constitutional promise into material security.

The recent surge in protests in Durban, Soweto and elsewhere is therefore an instructive context. Demonstrations triggered by misinformation about an asylum ruling quickly moved beyond argument into torched vehicles, looted shops and attacks on foreign-owned businesses. Months of anti-migrant mobilisation had already prepared the ground. What appears to be a dispute about documentation is, at a deeper level, an eruption of accumulated anger over unemployment, crime, weak services and a state whose authority is experienced as inconsistent.

The protests teach two lessons at once. The first is that public frustration cannot be dismissed as ignorance or bigotry simply because political entrepreneurs have given it a xenophobic vocabulary. The second is that hardship does not license vigilantism, collective punishment or the stripping of rights from migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. A serious democracy must hold both truths without surrendering to either denial or hatred.

The structural reality is that a job-starved economy has placed two vulnerable constituencies face to face: poor and unemployed South African citizens, and poor migrants seeking refuge, work or economic opportunity. Neither created the economy that excludes them. Yet, in neighbourhoods where clinics are crowded, housing is scarce, and work is precarious, they are encouraged to see one another as the cause of a crisis produced by slow growth, state incapacity and labour-market exploitation.

This is where constitutional government becomes most difficult. Section 7 obliges the state to respect, protect, promote and fulfil the rights in the Bill of Rights. Public officials must enforce immigration law, protect public order, safeguard asylum seekers and respond to citizens who feel abandoned. Every lawful decision will disappoint someone. But the state cannot resolve that tension by governing through panic, misinformation or retreat.

The burning tyre has become a recurring language of political exclusion: over water, electricity, housing, jobs, crime and now migration. Police may restore temporary calm, but they cannot repair the broken social compact.

The demand to “put South Africans first” has political force because citizenship must carry meaning. A democratic state owes its citizens accountable government, public services, safety and a plausible route into economic life. To say so is not inherently xenophobic. It becomes xenophobic when citizenship is converted into permission to humiliate outsiders, when all migrants are treated as illegal, or when nationality is used to excuse violence.

The harder question is why foreign workers have become so attractive to sections of the economy. The answer is not simply that South Africans refuse to work. In agriculture, construction, hospitality, retail, transport and the informal economy, vulnerable migrants are often easier to underpay, overwork and dismiss. Employers benefit from a labour force less able to invoke bargaining councils, unions or statutory protection. Anger directed only at migrants therefore leaves the architecture of exploitation intact.

Undocumented labour puts pressure on already fragile regulatory systems. Fraudulent credentials, porous borders and administrative delays cannot be wished away. The answer, however, is capable government: reliable population records, lawful and efficient asylum processing, enforcement against exploitative employers, proper workplace inspections and consequences for corruption at the border. A state that outsources immigration control to angry crowds has ceased to govern.

The economic case for sobriety is equally strong. Migrants are not a single bloc. Some compete with locals for scarce work; others fill shortages, create businesses, rent property, support wholesalers and employ South Africans. Removing them indiscriminately may satisfy a slogan while damaging farms, construction sites, delivery networks and township retail. Policy must distinguish between lawful migration, irregular presence, asylum and criminal conduct instead of collapsing all four into one enemy.

The protest wave also reveals how quickly a vacuum of trusted information becomes combustible. A court ruling that removed procedural barriers to lodging an asylum claim was recast online as an automatic amnesty. That falsehood travelled faster than legal explanation and found a receptive audience because institutional credibility was already depleted. Disinformation succeeds when government communication is late, technical and detached from communities’ lived anxieties.

South Africa must stop treating every protest outbreak as an isolated public-order incident. The burning tyre has become a recurring language of political exclusion: over water, electricity, housing, jobs, crime and now migration. Police may restore temporary calm, but they cannot repair the broken social compact. The frequency and intensity of protest tell the country that ordinary democratic channels no longer inspire trust.

The political temptation ahead of local elections will be to weaponise this resentment. Parties may promise mass removals, instant jobs or constitutional defiance. Such theatre will deepen the crisis. The responsible alternative is less dramatic but more demanding: rebuild municipalities, expand vocational and artisanal training, protect collective bargaining, prosecute employers who exploit undocumented workers, accelerate lawful immigration decisions and communicate honestly about what the constitution requires.

South Africans are entitled to demand that their democracy works for them. Foreign nationals are entitled to legal protection and human dignity. These claims are not mutually exclusive unless leaders make them so. The real contest is not between the local poor and the foreign poor; it is between democratic government and the failures that turn scarcity into suspicion and neighbours into enemies.

A democracy is judged not by how it behaves in comfort, but by how it governs at the extremes. South Africa must restore order without abandoning rights, hear the anger without endorsing hatred and make citizenship materially meaningful without making humanity conditional. If it fails, the next protest will not interrupt politics. It will be the clearest expression of politics itself.

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