We stand in firm, unyielding solidarity with working-class communities across the Eastern Cape and unequivocally condemn the escalating xenophobic incitement in Motherwell (Gqeberha), as well as the violent targeting and assassination of community activists in Ngcobo. We hold the ANC-led Government of National Unity directly responsible for creating the climate for xenophobic hatred that has inevitably incited tribalism and racism and provided a cover for outright criminality. Xenophobia serves as a distraction from the government’s culpability for the crisis of mass unemployment, poverty, inequality, service delivery collapse, corruption and corruption caused by its neo-liberal capitalist policies.

1. The Situation in Motherwell and Ngcobo: Incitement, Vigilantism, and Violence

In Motherwell, anti-migrant elements—specifically individuals operating under the banner of groups like March on March – recently gathered community members and vulnerable local youth at an open park in Bunyuluza Street. They explicitly incited attendees to commit housebreakings and robberies against non-nationals, calling for the blanket expulsion of all foreign nationals, documented or undocumented. Having previously been rejected by organised residents in Kamvelihle, these provocateurs shifted focus to exploit social distress in Motherwell.

This incitement occurs against a backdrop of escalating violence against grassroots organisers, highlighted by the tragic shooting in Ngcobo, Eastern Cape, which left one community activist dead and three wounded. Across the province and the country, poor communities and social movements face sustained targeting, intimidation, and assassinations when standing up for service delivery, municipal accountability, and human rights.

2. Contextualising the November 2026 Municipal Elections: Political Opportunism and Electoral Escalation

As South Africa approaches the November 2026 Local Government Elections, anti-migrant rhetoric has become increasingly prominent in electoral campaigning. Political parties and candidates must be held to account for the concrete policies, statements and organising methods they promote, particularly where these risk legitimising collective blame or vigilante action against migrants.

ActionSA has publicly advocated a substantially tougher immigration regime, including mass deportations of undocumented migrants and proposed constitutional changes affecting citizenship and access to public services. The party also states that it condemns xenophobia. Its candidates should therefore be required to explain clearly how their immigration policies will be pursued without encouraging collective punishment, harassment or violence – the very xenophobic actions it condemns but its national leader, Herman Mashaba actively incites by encouraging so-called citizens arrests.
Candidates and representatives of eg the Patriotic Alliance (PA) should be required to state clearly that they reject xenophobic intimidation and vigilantism. They should account publicly for any rhetoric that attributes social problems collectively to migrants. This includes the inflammatory remarks of its leader, Gayton Mackenzie’s who has publicly threatened foreign nationals in .. street.
Candidates and representatives of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) should likewise be required to state clearly that they reject attempts to associate migrants collectively with crime or unemployment, They should be required to commit to opposing the political capture of Community Policing Forums and other civic structures to legitimise and provide a cover for criminality.

This political posturing is not harmless electioneering. Where politicians turn legitimate anger over unemployment, crime, housing and failing services against migrants, they create conditions in which vigilantism, intimidation and criminal opportunism can grow.

The anger in our communities is real. But it is being deliberately directed at the wrong target.

Mass unemployment, poverty wages, overcrowded housing, failing clinics and schools, inadequate sanitation and collapsing municipal services were not created by migrants. They arise from economic and political choices that have left working-class communities competing over scarce jobs and inadequate public resources while wealth remains highly concentrated.

When unemployed young people are told that a migrant worker has ‘taken their job’, attention is diverted from employers who exploit both local and migrant labour. When residents are told that migrants are responsible for overcrowded clinics, the chronic understaffing and underfunding of public healthcare disappear from view. When foreign shopkeepers are blamed for poverty in townships, the larger economic forces shaping unemployment, prices and livelihoods escape scrutiny.

Xenophobia turns the anger of poor and working-class people against other poor and working-class people. Our task is to unite that anger around the conditions that workers and communities have in common. We should organise against the ANC-led Government of National Unity’s neo-liberal capitalist policies. These policies entail on the one hand, making the rich richer though eg corporate tax cuts and privatisation of services to profiteer through extortionate tariffs. On the other hand, they make the poor poorer through austerity that requires cuts in services.

Migrant workers are part of the working class, hundreds of thousands from neighbouring countries have been part of the development of eg the mining industry for more than a century. The destitution they are fleeing from is caused by multinationals, including SA mining companies exploiting the resources and labour, including children often in collusion with warlords.

The ANC-led GNU’s hypocritical claims that its only interest is in ensuring that migrants abide by the law and get documented. Yet it is the very neo-liberal austerity programme that has led to staff cuts, the closure of refugee application centres and a growing backlog. This has left not only many refugees without documents but tens of thousands of South Africans without IDs and birth certificates and Home Affairs’ backlog mounting.

The real reason the government is fueling xenophobia is to both distract attention from their culpability for the mass unemployment, poverty and collapse in services their neo-liberal capitalist policies are causing. Xenophobia furthermore turns the working class victims of these policies against each other not only on the basis of nationality but race and tribe.

Already South African Tsonga speaking people have been killed in the Western Cape because their murderers thought it was a foreign language.
March-on-March demonstrators sing songs insulting “Shangaan” people.
The Coloured People Congress’ Fadiel Adams says he agrees with the DA’s Helen Zille’s statement that black people in the Western Cape originating from the Eastern Cape are economic refugees and must return where they are from. The PA’s Gayton Mckenzie is inciting a sense of racial grievance amongst Coloureds ignoring he reality that per head of population poverty, unemployment and household income inequality is the greatest amongst black people.

The ANC-led GNU has discovered that xenophobia is as useful as an instrument to divide-and rule the working class under democracy as apartheid was for the white minority regime. Xenophobia serves today to facilitate the exploitation and impoverishment of the working class as a whole, in the same way as apartheid served to subjugate the black majority.

Migrant and South African workers have a common interest in fighting low wages, casualisation, labour broking and employers who exploit differences in nationality and legal status to weaken wages and working conditions. We demand equal pay and conditions for work of equal value for all workers. It is the most effective way to prevent the bosses from using one group of workers against another.

The MWP calls upon working class communities to respond to the new post-apartheid attempts to divide and rule the working class by uniting all our struggles in all the main theatres of struggle on as proposed in our community platform and programme of action. To unite communities, we call for the establishment of a United Socialist Civic Federation; for students and youth, a Marxist Youth and Students Movement, for women a Socialist Womens Movement, and for the workplace a Socialist Confederation of Trade Unions.

The experience of the entire post-apartheid period has demonstrated that unless the working class creates is own party, it will be no more than voting fodder for parties that represent the interests of the various sections of the capitalist class or those who wish to be assimilated into their ranks.

That SA, more than three decades after the end of apartheid the World bank has classified as the most unequal society on the planet, with amongst the highest levels of unemployment, crime, gender based violence, shows that the capitalist system is incapable of meeting the most basic and modest needs.

Who causes unemployment? The bosses and the government! There are nearly 100 000 public sector job vacancies across national and provincial government including nearly 40 000 teaching posts and 30 000 vacancies in the health sector unfilled.
More than 10% of university graduates cannot find jobs.
Corporate tax has been reduced from 52% to 27% of annual profits to allow the bosses to keep more of their profits and invest. But investment is at the same level as in 1946!
32% of SA’s industrial capacity is consequently lying idle. If the country’s existing capacity was fully utilised, 8m jobs would be created.
There is a bloodbath of unemployment. There are 4m foreign nationals in SA and 13m are unemployed. Even if every foreign national is deported, there would still be mass unemployment
StatsSA reports that 345 000 were retrenched in the first three months of 2026.
SA is a wealthy country with the most developed economy on the African continent. Who owns wealth? 10% own 84% of the wealth in assets and income; the bottom 50% own negative wealth.
What happens to this wealth? It is taken out of the country. The United Nations calculates that SA has lost R1.13 trillion in capital flight since 1995. Instead of investing, the capitalists take their money offshore to tax havens where they are shielded from paying tax.
The SA Revenue Service appointed Judge Dennis Davies to investigate the loss of R400bn per annum through illicit capital flight – theft in plain language. Judge Davies found that the top 10% of the 2000 multinationals operating in SA are responsible for 90% of this thievery. The country is being looted and pillaged by the wealthy. The government facilitates this looting whilst stoking xenophobia to blame poor foreign nationals eking out an existence in spaza shops and selling fruit and vegetables on street corners.

Capitalism must be abolished and replaced with a democratic socialist society. For this a mass workers party on a socialist programme is needed. The MWP therefore calls for all these different theatres of struggle to be united under a mass workers party on a socialist programme; a party built by the working class, of the working class and for the working class.

3. Call to Action: Unite Communities Around a Common Programme

1. Isolate the provocateurs: Reject organisations, political opportunists and individuals who exploit legitimate community grievances to incite working-class people against migrants or recruit unemployed youth into intimidation, robbery and violence.

2. Prevent vigilante violence: Build democratically elected and accountable community safety structures that defend all residents against criminal violence without collective punishment or vigilantism.

3. Demand law-enforcement accountability: Hold SAPS District Management, Crime Intelligence and the National Prosecuting Authority accountable for investigating incitement, solving attacks on community activists and dismantling criminal syndicates.

4. Jobs for all: Fight for a massive programme of socially useful public employment, with particular attention to unemployed youth, rather than allowing unemployment to be used to divide communities.

5. Equal pay for equal work: No employer should be permitted to use migrant labour to undercut wages, conditions or collective agreements. Labour rights must apply to all workers.

6. A living wage for all workers: Nationality must never determine the price of a worker’s labour.

7. Housing and services for working-class communities: Expand public housing, clinics, schools, water, sanitation and municipal infrastructure rather than forcing poor communities to compete over scarcity.

8. Organise local and migrant workers together: Trade unions and worker organisations should organise all workers irrespective of nationality or documentation status and fight attempts by employers to divide them.

9. Hold exploitative employers accountable: Enforce labour standards against employers who use workers’ immigration status to evade minimum wages, labour legislation or collective agreements.

10. Reject scapegoating in electoral campaigning: Demand that every candidate address unemployment, crime, housing, services and working conditions without blaming migrants collectively for failures they did not create.

An injury to one is an injury to all.

PUBLIC STATEMENT – (Issued by Marxist Workers Party)