The Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office (CPLO) has warned that South Africa’s persistent failure to confront xenophobic violence is not merely damaging the country’s international reputation but also tearing apart the social fabric and the basic trust on which any cohesive, democratic society depends.
The warning comes in the latest briefing paper written by CPLO director Fr Peter-John Pearson published against the backdrop of a new waves of anti-foreigner attacks in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.
Patterns of anti-migrant rhetoric has continued with “increasingly toxic consequences, both for those vulnerable groups most victimised but also for our democracy, the future of the politics for the common good, and the soul of South Africa”.
What is often reduced to a policy or policing problem is also a profoundly moral one: a question of who South Africans are and what kind of country they wish to inhabit.
The United Nations, in a statement issued in the name of secretary-general António Guterres, has condemned attacks on migrants, reminding South Africa that its liberation struggle had been sustained by African and international solidarity. Those responsible for violence, it said, must be investigated promptly, thoroughly and impartially.
The South African government’s initial response — a post on X noting that “many nations are navigating similar tensions” around undocumented migration — was widely read as defensive, Fr Pearson noted.
President Cyril Ramaphosa in a televised address, appealed directly to ubuntu and to the memory of African solidarity during the apartheid struggle. “We did not walk alone into freedom,” he said. “We were carried by a tide of solidarity from the nations of Africa, among many others. These countries opened their borders to our liberation fighters. They shared their bread and their homes.”
A developing political culture
While the president’s condemnation of vigilante violence was unequivocal, Fr Pearson noted, but the response as a whole has continued to treat xenophobia as a law-and-order problem rather than confronting the political culture that sustains it.
That culture, he warned, is becoming increasingly mainstream. With local elections approaching in November, anti-foreigner rhetoric has already taken hold across the political spectrum. Anti-migrant parties have made significant gains in recent by-elections, and other parties are now competing to outbid each other on deportation and exclusion.
Political analyst Ralph Mathekga has warned that South Africa is “grappling with a populist anti-immigration phenomenon that has infiltrated governance on an unprecedented scale”, with politicians turning to anti-immigrant populism because they appear unable to address the underlying socio-economic problems their constituents face.
Social justice activist Sipho Mthathi has identified the accountability failure at the heart of the problem. When Limpopo Premier Phophi Ramathuba berated a Zimbabwean patient on video for the cost of her hospital treatment, she faced no consequences. “A lesson was learned,” Mthathi writes. “There is no political cost to humiliating a foreigner in public. There is political reward. What follows is no longer a fringe. It is a market — and it is growing.”
Fr Pearson observed that the government’s persistent weakness has created a vacuum that populists and anti-foreigner groups have occupied with growing impunity — and that the longer it persists, the harder it becomes to reverse.
The priest reminded South African Catholics that the Church’s social teaching is unambiguous in its insistence on the dignity of every human person regardless of nationality or legal status, on the rights of migrants and refugees, and on the obligation of political communities to pursue the common good.
The preferential option for the poor and vulnerable — one of the pillars of Catholic social thought — applies with particular force to those who are caught in “the crosshairs of these attacks”, Fr Pearson said.
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