The targeting of migrant truck drivers in recent weeks is more than frustration over unemployment. The attacks are underlined by political opportunism, factional politics and ethnic division.
South Africans continually frame xenophobic attacks and school protests as a result of chronic unemployment and/or manipulation of the general public by the political and economic elites.
Indeed a recent publication on a news site suggested that the recent spate of attacks against migrant truck drivers was due to the mobilisation of xenophobic tactics by political elites and the soaring levels of unemployment in the country.
While socio-economic conditions contribute to an extent to social disruption, the hostility and bitterness levelled against foreigners in the country is too deeply entrenched and shared by South Africans in different cleavages including class, race, ethnicity and gender to stem from economic deprivation.
These attacks are a performative display of South African citizenship that is rooted in a narrow division of society between those who belong and those who do not.
The opportunism of uMkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans Association (MKVA), which is using the instance to push a narrative of citizenship embedded in ethnic sentiment, exacerbates the issue. The All Truck Drivers Foundation (ATDF) and the MKVA…