SAfm

Good morning. Good morning, Kathy, and good morning to your listeners tuning in across the country. I want to begin with a fundamental conviction. South Africans are not xenophobic or afrophobic. However, we are witnessing the rise of vigilanteism operating under the guise of civil society. These groups claim to speak for the market.

Marginalized, but we must look closer. The prevailing narrative suggests that anti-migrant hostility is an organic expression of grassroots anger. We must challenge this premise. What we are witnessing is a crisis being manufactured and exploited by self-appointed vigilante leaders seeking local power and populist political.

Factions deflecting accountability for service delivery failures. So migration has become political vocabulary through which exclusionary nationalism is mobilized. Racism is repackaged as border protection, and migrants become visible symbols of wider economic and political anxieties. To

Understand this engineered populism, as I would argue, we must tread a delicate line, acknowledging the legitimate grievance of our people without legitimizing violence. So, South Africa is a deeply wounded society living in a profound paradox. 32 years since our democracy, we have every

Right to celebrate our constitutional democracy. However, we remain one of the most unequal societies in the world, and apartheid geography continues to shape opportunity. When young people cannot find work, communities face rampant alcohol and substance abuse.

Run out of medical supplies and taps run dry. That distress is real. Young people being unemployed. So the anger is justified, but this is where the exploitation begins. Economic frustration creates a search for visible explanations. Structural inequalities, difficult to personify. Migrants, by contrast,

Visible. But African migrants did not create apartheid ownership patterns or our extraordinary level of inequality. Excluding them will not solve youth unemployment. It is also a betrayal of our history. So, if we are to overcome this crisis, we must reclaim our communities from those.