British opposition politician Nigel Farage announced last week that his Reform UK party would detain and deport all irregular migrants and ban them from re-entering the country for life.
He has vowed that his party would deport 600,000 people in its first parliamentary term.
His party has fulminated that the UK is being invaded by “fighting-age men” who are threatening “our women and girls”.
Anyone who has cursorily followed global politics for the past century will recognise the various dog whistles employed by Farage here.
He knows there is no way he can prove that he will fulfil any of these promises — so he makes them anyway to present himself as a man of action.
We know from what has happened in the US, where a president walked into office claiming he would end wars and deport violent illegal migrants, that such talk is pure baloney.
The wars are continuing and ordinary farm workers, not violent criminals, are being arrested.
“Before I even arrive at the Oval Office,” US President Donald Trump said on the campaign trail in August last year, “shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled.”
Yeah, right.
A bunch of unelected, unaccountable, ahistorical and, quite frankly, dangerously uneducated “activists” have been campaigning across SA’s urban centres to block immigrants from accessing healthcare facilities.
Pregnant women about to give birth have been turned away from hospitals and clinics.
Mothers and their children have been harassed for trying to get medication and other help from doctors.
This criminality has unfolded while the government has stood around, doing little or nothing to stop this horrendous, illegal, inhumane activity.
Let’s not beat about the bush here.
You must be a moron to even begin to support this and other similar actions.
It shows just how limited one’s thinking capacity can be.
Stopping a Zimbabwean mother from getting care at Baragwanath Hospital will not make a South African get better healthcare there.
The cancer machines are still broken, the tender system throttles the place, the floors are dirty.
Immigrants did not cause those problems. Your politically connected tenderpreneurs did that.
Let us start here: Why do we have so many “illegal immigrants” in SA?
Since 1994, the ANC government has dismantled border patrols, undermined border management and behaved as if there is no threat of people walking across the Limpopo River or other borders into SA.
Millions of Zimbabweans, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Bangladeshi and other nationalities fleeing economic devastation and wars trickled into SA.
If you were in war-torn Sudan, wouldn’t you do the same?
Not one of these immigrants wanted to leave their homes and come to a foreign, hateful land.
They fled hunger, war, poverty, unemployment and persecution in their home countries.
Take Zimbabwe. When Robert Mugabe was harassing journalists, killing activists, detaining opposition leaders, the SA government hailed him as an African hero and stood by him to continue his looting.
His wife, Grace, became Zimbabwe’s biggest individual landowner.
The economy collapsed. Thousands of Zimbabweans facing hunger fled to SA.
The ANC today still praises the undemocratic regime in Zimbabwe, which harasses the political opposition and has cheated in elections (according to the regional body Sadc’s own observers).
Do Operation Dudula’s leaders ever speak up about these things as they harass these Zimbabweans?
They are harassing the victim for the second time over!
That woman turned away from a clinic door is like the rape victim being assaulted by the police officer she has come to report the crime to.
This week, one of the ANC’s top seven leaders suggested in a social media post that SA’s “human rights culture” allowed immigrants to get a share of SA’s endowments (hospitals, and so on) whereas black South Africans themselves did not have access to these things.
It was an extraordinary message.
First, the ANC’s members lived for decades in African countries, accessing all kinds of services.
But the greater point is that this “leader” cannot recognise that she is supposed to bring about change if it is needed.
We are led by people who regard the state they lead as their enemy and as an entity which is useful only when they steal from it.
The state as an instrument for change is something that does not occur to them at all. They don’t know their power.
Here is a warning.
There are too many elected (Patriotic Alliance, ActionSA, and others) and unelected (Dudula, and so on) formations using immigration as a political football.
The noise levels are high, the mobilisation is loud and vigorous and the ANC-led government is weak, rudderless, and in many cases amenable to violent attacks on perceived or allegedly illegal foreigners.
The state has done nothing in the past few months as alleged illegal immigrants have been targeted at hospitals and other places.
It has taken no action to ensure that a July 2021 action is averted.
So, when the eruption comes, this administration will stand around for a week, caught in the headlights.
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