AFRICA CANNOT BUILD UNITY BY MAKING SOUTH AFRICA ITS SCAPEGOAT
South Africa’s migration debate is often reduced to a moral contest.
One side speaks about xenophobia, Afrophobia and the obligation to welcome fellow Africans. The other speaks about unemployment, strained public services, irregular migration and citizens who feel ignored inside their own country.
Both arguments can contain truth. Neither is enough on its own.
In his conversation with Nkepile Mabuse, Prof Gnaka Lagoke introduces a harder question: why does so much continental anger settle on South Africans while governments that fail their own citizens often escape equivalent scrutiny?
Prosperity attracts movement, but failure creates conflict
Lagoke draws on the history of Côte d’Ivoire, where cocoa and coffee helped establish one of French West Africa’s strongest economies. Workers arrived from neighbouring territories to support that growth.
South Africa’s gold economy created a comparable regional pull.
Movement followed opportunity. But when economic confidence weakened, questions about land, identity and belonging became sharper. Côte d’Ivoire’s distinction between indigenous communities and migrants became politically explosive and later fed wider national conflict.
The lesson is not that the two countries are identical.
It is that migration pressure cannot be separated from economic structure, political management and public confidence. Prosperity may attract people. Decline determines whether that movement is absorbed, governed or weaponised.
Solidarity cannot erase national responsibility
Lagoke rejects hatred and does not defend hostile methods directed at migrants. But he also challenges a Pan-African language that treats every concern raised by citizens as morally illegitimate.
A call for borderless Africa sounds generous in principle. It becomes more complicated when people believe they are competing for work, land, housing or public services while immigration systems are vulnerable to corruption.
The answer cannot be collective punishment of migrants.
It also cannot be silence about governments that export desperation by failing to create security and opportunity at home.
Lagoke’s sharpest observation is that it is easier to blame South Africans. That blame allows several institutions to disappear from view: governments that failed to develop their economies, officials who enabled fraudulent documentation, and political leaders who converted migration into a substitute for governing.
South Africa cannot solve every regional failure by absorbing its consequences.
Nor can it protect itself by dehumanising the people who arrive because those failures have narrowed their choices.
Ubuntu requires more than moral language
The conversation becomes most useful when it moves beyond accusation.
Lagoke defines Ubuntu through consensus, love, sharing, integrity and dignity. He presents it not merely as interpersonal kindness, but as a framework for national development and African integration.
That interpretation demands responsibility from everyone.
Governments must govern honestly. Citizens must reject hatred. Migrants must respect the laws and institutions of the societies in which they live. Communities must organise rather than waiting indefinitely for political rescue.
Lagoke points to tontines, stokvels and other African systems of pooled finance as evidence that the continent already understands collective mobilisation. The problem is not always that resources do not exist. It is often that they are mobilised during crisis, ceremony or death more easily than they are directed towards education, infrastructure and opportunity.
That is why the episode’s funeral-versus-scholarship example lands so painfully.
Communities can raise large amounts quickly when someone dies, yet struggle to summon the same urgency to finance a child’s future.
The continent needs accountability without hatred
Africa will not build unity by pretending borders, economies and state capacity do not matter.
It will also not build unity through scapegoating, exclusion or violence.
A credible Pan-African future must hold these truths together. South Africans should not be blamed for every failure produced elsewhere. Migrants should not be treated
as the human embodiment of those failures. Governments should not be allowed to escape responsibility by watching citizens fight among themselves.
Ubuntu without accountability becomes sentiment.
Accountability without Ubuntu becomes punishment.
Africa needs both.
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