Gangsters hitting foreigners in South Africa
How Emmanuel Sithole Was Stabbed To Death In South Africa.
Shortly before 7am yesterday April 18th, Sunday Times journalists were in Alexandra township, near Sandton, speaking to shop owners who had their businesses looted overnight.
Children played, people walked the streets, some stopped to gawk at the carnage from the night before. Then this happened …
In a gutter in Alexandra a Mozambican man stopped and lay down. The gash to his chest meant he could go no further.
At the day clinic less than 100m away they could not help him.
The doctor scheduled to be on duty did not show up because he was a foreigner and feared being a victim of xenophobia.
It began on Friday night when mobs blockaded Arkwright Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares in Alexandra, with rubble and burning tyres.
Foreign-owned shops’ roofs were ripped open and metal gates torn away as looters went on the rampage.
Outside one spaza shop, a man in a black corduroy jacket and red shirt was walking along the road.
Suddenly a young man dressed in a grey tracksuit jacket beat him over the head with a wrench.
The red-shirt man tried to fend off the blows, his arms raised.
He stumbled back, falling into rubbish strewn by the roadside.
The blows with the wrench rained down. Then the bludgeoning stopped and the man with the wrench moved away.
“Are we safe here?” asked a South African woman watching the attack.
The man in the red shirt got up. Now another man with a beige spottie approached, holding an okapi knife high above his head.
Again, the man in the red shirt raised his hands, pleading for mercy.
But his pleas were in vain. He was stabbed … again and again
The two grappled and fell to the floor. The man with the wrench returned. Finally, a lanky young man sprinted towards the man among the rubbish, kicking him in the head.
The young man pulled a butcher’s knife. A man in a black leather jacket who had discouraged the attack grabbed the wrist with the butcher’s knife. The attackers fled.
The red-shirt man tried to get up but fell. Finally he made it to his feet. Feebly, he walked up the road.
Do you know why they attacked you? Who are you? Where are you from, we asked him.
He turned his head towards the questions fired at him, his face pleading.
He said nothing. His shirt was drenched, a 2cm gash in his chest.
Metres further he stumbled and lay down in the gutter. He struggled to sit up and fell down
Help me get him into the car. Help me, please,” said photographer James Oatway, looking around at the men gathered around him. One stepped forward, reluctantly.
Up the road, at Alexandra Day Clinic, nurses did what they could. There was no doctor; he would have to be taken to Edenvale Hospital.
Along the way the man was flailing wildly, sitting up, lying down, wincing with pain. The wound to his chest was gushing now.
At Edenvale Hospital a lone gurney stood at the entrance. The porters sat in a room with tinted windows. Oatway pleaded for help. The man in the car was critical, he said.
Slowly one porter rose and scribbled in a book. Then the other, both now ambling towards the hospital entrance. Inside the car the red-shirt man looked lifeless.
“He’s dead. We can’t take him,” one porter pronounced.
There was no pulse. Then a gag reflex. He’s alive.
Inside the ICU, doctors compressed his chest, massaging his heart. After nearly seven minutes a ventilator was used.
Shortly after 9am Emmanuel Sithole was pronounced dead. He was Mozambican. The stab wound to his chest had penetrated his heart.
In his pockets, R285 and 10c in change and a cellphone. His phone would ensure he did not die nameless.
On his wrist, three armbands read: “United for Bafana.
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Gangsters hitting foreigners in South Africa
Insight: Are foreigners stealing jobs in South Africa?
International migrants are often accused of stealing jobs from locals in South Africa. But new data presents a far more nuanced picture of what it means to be a migrant trying to make a living in the country.
Researched by Kate Wilkinson
With every outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa, the refrain is the same. “The kwerekwere are stealing our jobs,” people say.
Shops are torched. Streets are barricaded. Tyres are set alight. Rocks become weapons. People are hacked, stabbed, shot and burned to death. Jubilant mobs hound Somalis, Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from their homes and businesses.
The claim that “foreigners” are taking jobs from South Africans“is an argument that is always made”, says Professor Loren Landau, director of the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at Wits University. “As if it justifies killing.”
The most recent spate of violence in Gauteng, which swept through parts of Soweto, Kagiso, Alexandra and Langlaagte, claimed the lives of six people, including a one month old child.
“I am not xenophobic”
Statements by some government ministers have done little to calm tensions.
In the weeks preceding the violence, Nomvula Mokonyane, the Minister of Water and Sanitation, commented on Facebook that in Kagiso “[a]lmost every second outlet (spaza) or even former general dealer shops are run by people of Somali or Pakistan origin (sic)…I am not xenophobic fellow comrades and friends but this is a recipe for disaster”.
And last week Small Business Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu told Business Day that “[f]oreigners need to understand that they are here as a courtesy and our priority is to the people of this country first and foremost… They cannot barricade themselves in and not share their practices with local business owners”.
New data provides new insights
“The idea that people are here ‘stealing’ jobs and that they don’t have a right to be here needs to be corrected,” says Dr Zaheera Jinnah, an anthropologist and researcher at the ACMS.
Myths and misconceptions travel quickly. But new data, some of which has yet to be published, presents a far more nuanced picture of what it means to be a migrant from Africa or Asia and trying to make a living in South Africa.
The Migrating for Work Research Consortium (MiWORC), an organisation that examines migration and its impact on the South African labour market, released two studies last year that drew on labour data collected in 2012 by Statistics South Africa.
They found that 82% of the working population aged between 15 and 64 were “non-migrants”, 14% were “domestic migrants” who had moved between provinces in the past five years and just 4% could be classed as “international migrants”. With an official working population of 33,017,579 people, this means that around 1.2-million of them were international migrants.
A racial breakdown of the statistics reveals that 79% of international migrants were African, 17% were white and around three percent were Indian or Asian.
Jinnah said that there were misconceptions about the size of the international migrant community in South Africa. “There is a disconnect between perception and reality largely because there hasn’t been data available until now. So a lot of what has been said and reproduced is based on hearsay and anecdotal evidence or myths.”
MiWORC found that Gauteng province had the highest proportion of foreign-born workers with around 8% of the working population having been born in another country.
Limpopo and Mpumalanga had the next highest proportion of international migrants at 4%, followed by North West (3%), the Western Cape (3%), Free State (2%), Northern Cape (1%), Eastern Cape (1%) and KwaZulu-Natal (1%).
Low unemployment rates
International migrants are more likely to be employed than South Africans. According to the MiWORC data, international migrants in South Africa have much lower unemployment rates than others. This is unusual. In most other countries, international migrants tend to have higher unemployment rates than locals.
South Africa’s unemployment data shows that 26.16% of “non-migrants” are unemployed and 32.51% of “domestic migrants” are unemployed. By comparison, only 14.68% of international migrants are unemployed.
But while international migrants are less likely to be unemployed, most find themselves in positions of unstable, “precarious employment”. They don’t have access to benefits or formal work contracts.
International migrants in South Africa are more likely to take jobs that locals are not willing to take or find work in the informal sector.
According to the MiWORC research, 32.65% of international migrants are employed in the informal sector in South Africa compared to 16.57% of “non-migrants” and 17.97% of “domestic migrants”.
The studies suggest that this is because the informal sector offers the lowest entry cost into the labour market. The majority of international migrants also come from African countries which have large informal sectors.
Foreigners don’t dominate informal sector
According to MiWORC’s research, international migrants are far more likely to run their own businesses. Eleven percent are “employers” and 21% are classed as “self-employed”. By comparison, only 5% of non-migrants and domestic migrants were employers and only 9% of non-migrants and 7% of domestic migrants were self-employed.
Late last year, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory – a collaborative project between Wits University, the University of Johannesburg and the provincial government – conducted a limited survey of the informal sector in Johannesburg.
Dr Sally Peberdy, a senior researcher at the Observatory – says that the belief that international migrants dominate the informal sector is false. “We found that less than two out of 10 people who owned a business in the informal sector [in Johannesburg] were cross-border migrants.”
Peberdy argues that international migrants do play a positive role in South Africa. “The evidence shows that they contribute to South Africa and South Africans by providing jobs, paying rent, paying VAT and providing affordable and convenient goods.”
The Observatory’s study, which is due to be published tomorrow, found that 31% of the 618 international migrant traders interviewed rented properties from South Africans. Collectively they also employed 1,223 people, of which 503 were South Africans.
*This article was commissioned by the Sunday Times. The article was sent to us for publication by Africacheck.org