LIVE FROM JOHANNESBURG: In the working-class townships of Gauteng province, the price of bread has become a question of survival. This week, machete-wielding mobs have targeted foreign-owned shops and migrant workers, leaving at least four dead and dozens injured. The violence, rooted in grievances over jobs and housing, echoes the dark days of 2008 and 2015, when xenophobic attacks swept the nation.
For the miners and factory hands I speak to, this is not simply a story of hatred. It is a story of economic collapse. South Africa’s unemployment rate sits at 32.9 per cent, the highest in the world. Among young people, it is over 60 per cent. In the goldfields around Johannesburg, where I grew up, men who once worked the shafts now queue for day labour that pays 150 rand (£6) for 10 hours. They watch as migrant workers, often from Zimbabwe or Mozambique, accept lower wages and are hired ahead of them.
“They take our jobs,” a man named Thabo told me this morning, his hands calloused from years underground. “But I do not blame them. I blame the bosses who pay us nothing.” His anger is misdirected, perhaps, but it is born of a real desperation. The cost of maize meal, a staple, has risen 15 per cent in a year. Electricity tariffs have soared. The unions, once the backbone of the anti-apartheid struggle, are in decline. The Congress of South African Trade Unions has lost a third of its members since 2000.
The government’s response has been slow. President Cyril Ramaphosa condemned the attacks, calling for calm. But in the streets of Jeppestown, where looters set fire to a Somali-owned shop last night, there is no sign of police. The National Union of Metalworkers has called for a general strike, but it is unclear if workers will down tools.
This is the real economy: not the stock exchange in Sandton, but the queues for food parcels, the shuttered factories, the makeshift shelters. The migrant crisis is a symptom of a deeper sickness: a country that has failed to deliver on the promise of jobs and dignity after apartheid. Until that changes, the mobs will keep coming.
Reporting from Johannesburg, I am Sarah Jenkins. More to follow.
