Julius Malema and by and large the EFF have flirted with xenophobia for some time but this week when he inspected restaurants at the Mall of Africa in Midrand to check the ratio between foreign and South African workers it became an almost inescapable embrace.
While the EFF contends that its actions were peaceful, in a country that has long struggled with xenophobic attacks and stereotypes against our fellow Africans, as the Sunday Times Daily points out (for subscribers), such an inspection has, “an underlying message of hatred from people in authority can cause huge damage in a country where tensions between locals and foreign nationals have been simmering below the surface — and often boiling over — for a long time.”
The publications’ editorial highlights some of the darkest marks in South Africa’s post-democratic history, which have often been stained by acts of xenophobia.
When the publication asked labour lawyer Dunstan Farrell if inspecting worker ratios and raiding shops suspected of being owned by “illegal immigrants”, as the Patriotic Alliance’s leader Gayton McKenzie did last week in Eldorado Park, Johannesburg, was a legal act, he responded by calling Malema’s actions, “discriminatory, racist and xenophobic”.
We have some way to go to repair our relationship with our brothers and sisters across the continent and repeated attacks against foreign nationals goes a long way to proving the stereotype that South Africans are xenophobic, let us hope that is not the case.
Meanwhile, 12 hours after her statement last night that she stood by her controversial opinion piece after the presidency said Lindiwe Sisulu would apologise and retract her remarks, the tourism minister has released a follow-up statement.
In it she says while she respects the presidency, the President’s media team “was deliberately mischievous in the statement issued, as the Minister at no point in the conversation was firstly admonished or secondly expressed regrets resulting in agreeing to withdraw or apologise for her article, but agreed to reconsider the particular line relating to the judiciary which the President had raised the issue with and was to share with her.”
In Sisulu’s statement on Thursday evening, she reiterated that she stood by what she wrote in her original article and confirmed that she and the president did meet on Wednesday evening to discuss a specific passage of the article that the president took umbrage with.
“I wish to categorically disown this statement in its entirety as a misrepresentation of the said meeting I had with the president. The president and I met on Wednesday at 21:00 at his house,” she said in a statement.
As we said this morning, it seems the battle lines for a Ramaphosa versus Sisulu campaign for the ANC presidency has started to form and if anything Sisulu isn’t backing down from the fight.
