Mashaba’s playing a dangerous foreigner card

He probably won’t like to hear it, but Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba is on the way to becoming the other side of the same very dangerous racist and xenophobic coin occupied by EFF leader Julius Malema. His comments yesterday about foreigners in his city had the same flavour as Malema’s about white people.

And, in the same way as Malema is shamelessly playing to the populist gallery as a way of garnering support, Mashaba’s stance on foreigners is exploiting the fears of South Africans that they will lose out on housing, jobs and other resources because of the influx of people from the rest of Africa.

Just as Malema’s inflammatory rhetoric could lead to violence, so, too, could Mashaba’s statement. It takes very little to spark a conflagration in that highly volatile area of our society.

The Joburg mayor has made it his DA campaign policy that he will be the man who rids the city of illegal foreigners … and he has drawn battle lines with national government as he does so.

Mashaba took on no less than President Cyril Ramaphosa, accusing him of being “reckless” in suggesting that Africa’s borders open up to allow freer movement of its people. Mashaba said Ramaphosa’s remarks – at a major African gathering in Kigali, Rwanda, this week – were “completely devoid of understanding of the real challenges we are facing on the ground”.

We are not saying that Mashaba’s remarks have no basis in reality: he speaks the truth when he says our immigration and border control systems should be run efficiently. And increasing population numbers – wherever those people come from (the rest of this country or elsewhere in Africa) – do mean there is less to go round.

But there are ways of achieving this without picking a fight with the president and blatantly playing the foreigner card.