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Advocacy & Human Rights  ·  South Africa

When a nation drives away those who feed it, house its elderly, grow its economy, and till its fields — it does not gain its soul. It loses it. South Africa is being warned by history, by conscience, and by God.

Collen Makumbirofa·Advocacy Journalist & Human Rights Defender·June 2025

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They shout “Abahambe” — let them go. The chant rises from street corners and social media feeds, from the mouths of those who believe that driving out foreign nationals will unlock a golden door of opportunity for South Africans. But every economist, every moral philosopher, every person who has stood in a vegetable market or paid rent from a foreign tenant’s money, knows what those who shout do not: when the foreigners go, they do not take their poverty. They leave behind a wreckage that will take generations to repair.

This is not a plea for pity. This is a reckoning — a sober, unflinching catalogue of the disaster that awaits a country that expels the very people sustaining its daily life, and a warning that the curses now descending on this beloved land will not be lifted easily.

The Economy That Feeds on Foreigners — and Does Not Know It

Walk through City Deep, Johannesburg’s vast fresh produce hub. The stalls are stacked with tomatoes, spinach, onions, and peppers — kept moving by the networks of foreign traders who buy, transport, and sell at prices that feed poor communities. When those traders are gone, those vegetables will rot in the sheds. Perishables do not wait for politics. Farmers across the country who planted their horticulture for a market that included foreign buyers will carry the loss alone, with no compensation and no apology from those who chased their customers away.

Supermarkets and spaza shops across South Africa sell their goods to foreign nationals every single day. Foreigners are consumers. They are customers. Their presence increases demand for South African products — bread, cooking oil, electricity, airtime, clothing. When hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals leave or are displaced, the decline in purchasing power will be immediate and measurable. Business owners will see profits shrink, and many will be forced to retrench South African workers to stay afloat. The irony is cruel and precise: the very South Africans cheering for foreigners to leave may find themselves among the unemployed.

“When the foreigners go, they do not take their poverty with them — they leave behind a wreckage that will take generations to repair.”

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The Landlords Who Will Weep

Across townships, suburbs, and peri-urban settlements, there are thousands of South African homeowners who depend on the monthly rent paid by foreign nationals. Many of these landlords are elderly women — grandmothers who are no longer working, who use the income from renting a backyard room or a small flat to buy food and school uniforms for their grandchildren. Foreign tenants pay millions of rands in rent every month to South African homeowners. When the tenants leave, the income stops. No advocacy group will come to replenish those lost rents. No government will issue a replacement grant. The silence will be absolute.

Consider the banking system. Millions of rands deposited in South African banks are owned by foreign nationals — savings, business accounts, stokvels, investment accounts. These funds circulate through the South African economy, enabling credit, liquidity, and growth. As foreigners relocate to other countries, that capital moves with them. South Africa’s banking sector will feel this departure, and the ripple effects will reach ordinary South Africans who never stopped to consider whose money was flowing beside theirs.

The Children Who Will Be Abandoned

Foreign nationals have built families in South Africa. Many have children here with South African mothers and fathers — children who are citizens, who speak Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, who go to local schools and play in local streets. When their foreign parent is expelled or flees in fear, those children face abandonment — unless the departing parent succeeds in taking them, which often means tearing them away from the country of their birth against a South African parent’s will. Either outcome is a wound inflicted on an innocent child. Either outcome is a failure of the society that claims to protect children above all else.

And the children still in school — foreign children and the children of foreign parents — are already being chased from classrooms before their parents even know what is happening. South African children, taught by adults filled with hatred, are being weaponised against their schoolmates. What lesson does a child carry for life when the adults in their world tell them to drive another child away? The curriculum of xenophobia will graduate a generation unfit for a peaceful future.

The Diplomatic and Trade Price South Africa Has Not Calculated

South African goods — from retail chains to agricultural exports — reach markets across Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. These are not charity exports. They are commercial relationships built over decades. When those countries watch their citizens being beaten, robbed, and killed in South African streets, when they receive repatriation flights carrying their traumatised nationals, they do not forget. Consumer sentiment hardens. Governments apply quiet pressure. The same goods that once sold easily begin to face resistance — not from trade policy, but from ordinary people who remember what South Africa did to their relatives. A sharp decline in the purchase of South African products in the region is not a distant threat. It is already beginning.

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Warning to Employers: Business owners who employ foreign nationals are already being targeted — harassed, threatened, and in some cases, eliminated in criminal attacks designed to look like robbery. Many will close businesses rather than continue operating under such danger. Others will adopt a policy of deliberate non-hiring to avoid becoming targets. South Africa loses jobs not because foreigners are taking them, but because the threat environment has made investment and employment a risk no rational businessperson wants to absorb. No new investor will enter a country that kills vulnerable people in its streets.

The Graves That Turn — The Spirits That Cry Out

South Africa was not always this. There was a generation of men and women who suffered exile, imprisonment, and death so that this nation could become a republic of dignity — for all who live in it. Nelson Mandela. Govan Mbeki. Walter Sisulu. Oliver Tambo. Chris Hani. Desmond Tutu. Chief Albert Luthuli. These founding souls did not endure what they endured so that a new generation could replicate the logic of apartheid against a different group of people. The hatred now being directed at foreign nationals wears different clothes, but it carries the same spirit — the spirit of exclusion, of dehumanisation, of using violence to determine who belongs and who does not.

The graves of these founding fathers are turning. Their spirits are not at rest. And a nation that dishonours the legacy of its liberators does not escape the consequences lightly.

South Africa will not find peace when the foreigners leave. Those who believe that unity will follow expulsion do not understand the history of this country. Tribal tensions that were suppressed by the project of national liberation — tensions between communities, between languages, between regions — are already beginning to resurface. The same violence, the same logic of exclusion, will turn inward. After the foreigners are gone, the guns will look for new targets. South Africa will know tribal wars and racial wars the likes of which it hoped it had left behind.

The Crime That Damns a Nation

Children are being raped in South African streets. This is not a foreign import. This is a domestic catastrophe. And those who commit such acts — who murder, who traffic, who consume the bodies of the innocent — are not troubled by where their victims were born. They do not check passports. A society that has lost its reverence for the sanctity of human life, that has produced people capable of such acts, is not a society threatened by foreigners. It is a society at war with its own soul.

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And into this catastrophe come the self-righteous voices demanding that the undocumented poor be forbidden from working — forbidden from earning food, from feeding their children, from surviving. What do you want them to eat? What do you want their children to drink? To forbid the poor from working because they lack paperwork is not a policy. It is a sentence of death passed by those who will never miss a meal. It is a high crime against human dignity. It is — and there is no softer word for it — high treason against God.

Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry.— Exodus 22:21–23

• Fresh produce will rot at City Deep and supply chains will collapse as foreign traders disappear.
• Millions of rands in rent income will dry up for South African homeowners — including pensioners and grandmothers.
• Consumer spending will fall, profits will shrink, and South African workers will be retrenched.
• Billions in deposits held by foreign nationals will leave South African banks as people relocate.
• South African goods will face growing boycotts in Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.
• Investors will withdraw from a nation with a documented record of street-level violence against migrants.
• South African children with foreign parents will face abandonment or forced displacement.
• After the foreigners are expelled, tribal and racial conflict will find new kindling within.

South Africa is now Cry, the Beloved Country.
Pray for the safety of every child within her borders.

May God have mercy on this nation — and may its people choose a wiser path before the consequences already in motion become irreversible.

CM

Collen Makumbirofa

Advocacy Journalist & Human Rights Defender
Founder, Makumbirofa Farms (Pty) Ltd  |  Reg. No. 2024/367872/07
www.makumbirofafarms.co.za  ·  admin@makumbirofafarms.co.za

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