Mbeki’s denial of xenophobia ignores South Africa’s reality

Thabo Mbeki, our former president, seems determined to go down guns blazing on the sinking ship of a claim that “South Africans are not xenophobic”.

Speaking during the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs’ (TMSchool) student engagement event at Unisa in Pretoria, he claimed the 2008 xenophobic violence that tore through townships around South Africa had been deliberately “orchestrated”, claiming he had seen a secret intelligence report detailing the plotting.

While he was deliberately vague about the details, it seems likely he was trying to imply that Zimbabwean opposition parties were guilty of stoking the flames – part of a campaign to force Zimbabweans to go back to their country to vote and oust Robert Mugabe via the ballot box.

His implication is all the more likely when you consider Mbeki’s track record. He has been a staunch xenophobia denialist, even to this day.

Perhaps because he wants to blame some “third force” or perhaps because he wants to avoid the uncomfortable discussion about how the ANC’s lax border controls allowed millions of economic migrants – not genuine refugees – to flood this country.

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There is also the small matter of his overt and covert support for Mugabe and him turning a blind eye to the brutality of the ZanuPF regime in our neighbour.

How likely is it that anti-Mugabe loyalists in South Africa would have been able to plan and coordinate such violence against their own countrymen, yet still been able to disguise their own origins from the South Africans they used as stooges?

Not very likely, we would suggest…

Mbeki is a politician who tends to consider Africa one big happy continent and that all the evils are spread by imperialists or the West.

That view refuses to acknowledge the elephant of xenophobia in the room… and deal with its root causes.

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