Ruminations on Neo Apartheid and the Lump of Labour Fallacy

Typical day-long queue at dilapidated home affairs office

Aweh dearly beloved fellow ruminants & groupies in day 64 of no lockdown.

Period as an ivory tower academic 70 days

A good blog or essay is written with a combination of head and heart. A fact and analysis-based essay needs some heart and perhaps some humour to make a good argument. An essay written purely from the heart needs some grounding in factual reality to be convincing and not a political manifesto or a rant.

Most of my blog posts, particularly on the topic of energy or climate change, strive to have a fact and analysis bias with some heart and humour. I am a science geek after all. Today I am going to write more from the heart and then throw in some analysis.

There is a very disturbing global populist trend to restrict the movement of people and identify yourself with a particular grouping and then seek to exclude those foreign to your grouping. This is, of course, exactly what Apartheid sought to do, and it used race as the classification of choice. The movement of people was restricted based on race and there were forced removals. People were told where to live and their movement was restricted and a callous state bureaucracy together with the police, known for its brutality, enforced this regime. This was a cruel and inhumane policy, and we can be pleased we have left this behind.

So, have South Africa and the world left Apartheid to rot in the dustbin of history? I will argue today that neo-Apartheid (I have always wanted to coin a term starting with neo) is flourishing both in South Africa and globally. Race is no longer a classification that is acceptable as a basis for neo-Apartheid apart from the concept of trying to redress the wrongs of the past. Redressing the wrongs of the past is not a topic I wish to discuss today but rather the new wrongs we are perpetrating today. The classifications used today for neo-Apartheid are foreigner, illegal immigrant, refugee, and my personal favourite “illegal alien” favoured by the US government.  

So, let’s start with what our post-Apartheid government is busy with today. There are 200 000 Zimbabweans in South Africa who are living on borrowed time. They are in the country on a special visa, the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit (ZEP). This visa category was introduced more than a decade ago to accommodate an influx of refugees who were fleeing political persecution and economic devastation in Zimbabwe. They are still here today, and they are teachers, nurses, academics, waiters, Uber drivers, and entrepreneurs hustling to make a living. They are not South Africans and are a form of underclass not eligible for social grants and eternally dependent on their permit being renewed. There is no safety net. They work hard and many of them send money back to family in Zimbabwe which is a failed state. Here in Johannesburg, I interact with dozens of Zimbabweans every week.

Late last year South Africa’s home affairs department, amid rising populist Afrophobic sentiment decided to start tightening the screws. Their special visas will expire at the end of the year, and they will then have to leave, or risk being deported. Those that have formal employment will lose their jobs as their employers are not permitted to hire people without a visa.

In theory, these Zimbabweans can apply for their visas to be renewed if they comply with stringent conditions. For those of you who are not South African, the department of home affairs is horrifically dysfunctional both operationally and ideologically. Left to their own devices almost all the visas will not be renewed. That is the intent.

There are any number of heart-breaking stories unfolding. Children who arrived with their parents in 2009 whose whole lives are in South Africa face deportation to a failed state where they know nobody. Many of these Zimbabweans have married South Africans and have had children. In the eyes of home affairs, this does not remove the stain of being Zimbabwean and their visas are set to expire. It is an arduous, difficult, undignified, and very slow process for someone who marries a South African to obtain a visa to live in South Africa and then a work permit to work in South Africa. I have personal experience of watching people go through this nightmare. The message from home affairs is clear. It is better not to marry a foreigner and if you do it might be easier for you to emigrate.

What is now unfolding in South Africa is neo-Apartheid. It is just as brutal, just as wrong but it is popular and is not generating anything near the outrage that Apartheid did. It should. This is now being challenged in court and time will tell if the courts are able to halt this.

This is not just a South African story. A large part of what drove Brexit is a populist desire to get rid of the foreigners. Donald Trump rode into the White House on the back of promises to build an enormous wall on the Mexican border to keep the Mexican drug dealers and rapists (he said it) out.

America now makes it very difficult for a South African to visit the USA. I have an acquaintance who wanted to attend her daughter’s wedding in America in July. You need to attend an interview at the American embassy in Johannesburg. The first available interview slot was in September. In the end, she took time off and stayed in a hotel in sleepy Swaziland to go to the small US embassy there. The visa application process is arduous, and Nerine and I are still busy with the process of trying to get a visa for her 81-year-old mother so that she can visit her son. She will not be going to Swaziland, and she will have to wait. Unless things change, I get the message.  I’m probably not going to go to the USA again, except potentially, on business because I know when I’m not wanted. There is blah blah blah from the US embassy about Covid, backlogs, etc. in a pitiful attempt to justify the situation but the truth is this is not an important issue for the USA, and they don’t care enough to resolve this. If they wanted to, they could.

Why do we behave like this? It is an inherent unlikeable feature of humanity not to like or care about the other group. The group can be classified in many ways. It is no longer acceptable to discriminate based on race or gender but if you are a foreigner, it’s still ok. Humans need a group not to like and to blame for problems in their society. It’s their fault.

How do we try to justify this? Apart from the crude justification that the foreigners are criminals and rapists who are ruining the indigenous culture the somewhat more sophisticated justification usually runs along the lines of scarce resources and jobs. The foreigners are freeloaders on the state and steal jobs from the locals. This statement is assumed to be an axiomatic truth. Jobs are a zero-sum game. How true is this?

This then brings me to the lump of labour fallacy. Are there a fixed number of jobs in South Africa? If we send 200 000 hardworking hustling Zimbabweans back to Zimbabwe will South Africa really be better off?  Can the most enterprising people Zimbabwe have to offer create jobs in South Africa? Have US jobs benefited from having the South African-born Elon Musk living in America or is he just a freeloader? There is not a fixed number of jobs and foreigners stealing our jobs is just a convenient fiction to justify our prejudice.

The national borders in Africa are a product of colonialism and now post colonialism the concept of decolonisation is popular, but this does not stretch to thinking about the borders. Enforcing the colonial borders is very popular and no political party can ignore that.

Thank you for all the ideas and comments. I really appreciate them and please keep them coming.

Regards

Bruce