NO XENOPHOBIA in South Africa - It's what the ANC Built!

Indiziert: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Every time South Africans confront the foreign national question, the media reaches for the same word, xenophobia.

[00:00:10]I've been thinking about this for quite a while, not as a knee-jerk reaction to a headline, but as a genuine attempt to understand what is actually happening on those streets and why the label we keep attaching to it is making the problem worse rather than better.

[00:00:30]Because here is the thing about a wrong diagnosis.

[00:00:35]You can treat the patient forever. You will never cure them. And right now, South Africa is being treated for xenophobia when the actual condition has a completely different name. Thank you to every subscriber who supports this channel. Watching these videos is what keeps this channel going. And uh for those who have discovered this for the first time, I am Randrew and this is the Randrew show.

[00:01:06]Xenophobia means hatred for foreigners, a deep irrational identity based hostility towards someone simply because of where they were born.

[00:01:18]Now ask yourself honestly, is that what is driving what you see in those areas where some of these attacks have taken place? Because I do not believe it is.

[00:01:30]And the distinction matters far more than it might seem.

[00:01:34]When you call something xenophobia, the story becomes about the moral character of the population.

[00:01:42]It points inward at the people doing the attacking, at the townships, at some imagined ugliness in South African society. And moral conversations are very satisfying to have and very easy to close without fixing anything structural. Follow the logic the other way and see where it goes. If this is not xenophobia but unemployment unrest directed at people perceived to be competing for scarce resources, then you have to ask why the unemployment is this severe. And then someone has to account for 30 years of economic policy that has failed to create enough jobs for its own citizens.

[00:02:32]Someone has to explain why investors keep choosing other destinations.

[00:02:36]Someone has to name the policy environment that made South Africa this unattractive to capital. You cannot report on what is happening in those streets without eventually arriving at the ANC's economic record. The word xenophobia makes sure you never get there.

[00:02:56]That is precisely why it keeps getting used.

[00:03:01]In the first quarter of 2026, South Africa's official unemployment rate climbed to 32.7%.

[00:03:08]I think that is 8.14 million people without work.

[00:03:14]300,000 odd of those were lost just in the first quarter of this year. Expand the definition to include the discouraged work seekers, the people who have uh stopped looking for work because there is nothing to look for. And then that figure crosses the 40% mark and for young South Africans it is above 45 50%.

[00:03:40]The economy has grown at less than 1% compound annually for a decade. The population grows at around 2%. That means in real terms every naturalborn South African is poorer today than a decade ago. And that is before you even introduce the immigration question. And into that environment, a foreigner arrives. He accepts any work because anything is more than he had at home. He will take wages below the minimum because the alternative for him is going back home with nothing. And he does not report his employer to the Department of Labor. He is invisible to the state and he is completely visible to the neighbor who has been unemployed for 3 years. Is that neighbor's anger xenophobia or is it desperation that has found the most visible explanation available to it?

[00:04:38]There is something about the foreigner's position that I think is worth understanding. Not to excuse anything, but because it is part of what makes this situation so difficult. The person who arrives in South Africa from Zimbabwe, from Mosmbique or from the DRC, in most cases, he's running from something far worse.

[00:05:02]His survival mode is fully engaged. He will take any work. He will start at the very bottom. He will accept conditions that a local will not because the alternative is going back home to nothing. And that is not a character flaw. That is actually a remarkable demonstration of the human will to survive.

[00:05:26]But it creates a structural tension that no amount of tolerance messaging resolves because the local who was born here, who went through whatever education the state provided, who was told there would be opportunities, is now losing a competition he never expected to be in. Not because he is lazy, but because the economy his government was supposed to build for him was never built. The foreigner did not cause that. But the foreigner is the most visible consequence of it.

[00:06:05]Here is the layer of this story that almost never gets told. Honestly, South Africa's immigration system has been turned into a marketplace. Permits and visas are easily obtained fraudulently.

[00:06:21]Just need a couple of bucks. Falsified documentation. Border enforcement that the party and the government would admit if pressed is one of their most visible and least contested failures. The people raising concerns about this in the townships have been raising them for years. They have been told to be more tolerant.

[00:06:47]They have been told that the problem is not what they think it is. The government did not listen. The borders stayed porous. The documentation stayed compromised.

[00:07:00]When people without resources and without lawyers cannot get the government to act through any normal channel, what do they do? They take to the streets. That is not a sophisticated political strategy. That is what happens when everything else has been tried and ignored. The frustration is legitimate.

[00:07:25]The violence is not. Both of those statements need to be made simultaneously, and most commentators are not willing to make one of them.

[00:07:35]Now, we arrive at the part of this video that should concern you the most. Local government elections are scheduled for 4 November 2026. Research from the Inclusive Society Institute shows that distrust of African immigrants climbed from 62.6% in 2021 to 73.1% in 2025. That is a 10point shift in 4 years. That is not organic social change. That is an electorate being primed. Groups like March and March have already been marching through Chan and Janisburg and certain political figures are already appearing alongside them.

[00:08:20]The anti-immigration sentiment is being converted into electoral energy right now in real time. Here is the obscinity sitting in that process. The politicians positioning themselves to benefit from this anger are the political heirs of the governance failures that produced it. The same policy environment that repelled investment, suppressed job creation, and left 8 million people with nothing. That environment produced the desperation now being harvested at the ballot. They broke the economy. Now they are running on the rage the broken economy created and the media by calling it xenophobia instead of what it is is helping them do it.

[00:09:12]Let me draw this line as plainly as I can. South Africa has among the highest unemployment rates in the world. That is not a natural condition. It is the direct product of an economy that has failed to attract sufficient investment for three decades.

[00:09:31]One of the primary reasons investors consistently site for avoiding South Africa is be the requirement to transform ownership, management and procurement in ways that add cost, complexity and risk to every business decision made here.

[00:09:51]Less investment means fewer businesses.

[00:09:54]Fewer businesses means fewer jobs. Fewer jobs means millions of people with nothing competing in in an informal economy with no protection and no future.

[00:10:06]In that environment, the foreign national who is willing to work for less becomes the most visible explanation of why the local has nothing. He did not cause the shortage, but he inherits the anger that it produces. So when you watch those attacks on the news and social media and you hear the word xenophobia, understand what that word is covering up a straight line from ANC economic policy to those streets.

[00:10:39]That line runs through be.

[00:10:42]That line runs through 30 years of governance failure. That line runs through every canceled investment, every closed factory, every young South African who studied and still cannot find work.

[00:10:57]Xenophobia ends the conversation before it reaches Latuli House. That is precisely why it keeps getting used.

[00:11:06]So here we are. South Africa has 8.14 million unemployed people. The economy has underperformed population growth for 10 years. The immigration system is broken by the government's own admission. And we are heading into an election where all of that is about to be weaponized by the very people who caused it. So here is the question. If after 30 plus years the ANC's investment policies had actually worked, if BE had brought the money into the economy instead of driving it away, how many of the 8.14 million unemployed South Africans would be working today? Do share this video with someone that you think needs to hear this story. If you have subscribed, thank you very much.

[00:11:56]It's really appreciated and it does help the channel. Do drop your thoughts in the comments. I love to read your ideas and your thoughts. I will catch you in the next one.