Africa's Anti-Migrant Wave: When Economic Pain Fuels Border Hostility

Across the African continent, millions of ordinary people who cross borders in search of safety or a livelihood face a recurring threat: not just violence from mobs, but a political culture that makes them convenient targets whenever economic conditions worsen. The attacks on migrants in South Africa have drawn the loudest international condemnation, but treating xenophobia as a uniquely South African failure obscures a harder truth that affects citizens and migrants in nearly every African nation.

No person should be assaulted, displaced or killed for crossing a border. That principle is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the continent’s outrage is honest. Xenophobia in Africa predates South African democracy by decades. It is woven into the policy decisions of multiple governments, each with its own history of expelling fellow Africans when economic pressures mounted.

Ghana’s 1969 Aliens Compliance Order expelled between 140,000 and 200,000 undocumented migrants, many of them Nigerians who had built lives and trading networks there over years. Nigeria responded in 1983 with mass expulsions of more than a million undocumented migrants, predominantly Ghanaians, in an episode that produced the phrase “Ghana Must Go.” In Côte d’Ivoire, the politics of ivoirité transformed long-settled migrants and their descendants into permanent outsiders, a status that contributed to the country’s descent into civil war. South Africa did not invent this continental habit. It inherited it and expressed it with greater violence than most.

The underlying mechanism is consistent across these cases. Economic strain creates conditions where migrants become the most convenient available target for political blame. In contemporary Ghana, business groups have recently demanded that Nigerian traders leave the country, accusing them of displacing local shopkeepers. The language differs from South Africa’s mob violence, but the logic is identical: foreigners absorb blame for unemployment, hardship and economic scarcity that actually stem from policy failures and structural problems.

Xenophobia rarely begins with spontaneous mob action. Politicians and business associations deliberately position migrants as villains, a choice far easier than confronting the institutional failures that actually drive economic distress. The strategy works because it offers a simple explanation for complex problems, and ordinary citizens pay the price.

The question of whether South Africa has become Africa’s scapegoat demands nuance. South Africa must answer for the killings, looting and displacement occurring within its borders. At the same time, allowing the conversation to stop there permits every other government to escape reckoning with its own history and present-day anti-migrant rhetoric. Selective outrage carries a real cost. It undermines Africa’s claim to any shared moral authority. A government cannot credibly condemn xenophobic violence in Johannesburg while tolerating anti-migrant rhetoric in its own capital.

Beneath these recurring crises lies something larger: the slow erosion of Pan-Africanism itself. The generation that established the Organisation of African Unity did not merely fight colonial rule. They fought against the notion that colonial borders should permanently divide Africans into separate, mutually suspicious populations. That vision animated the OAU and later the African Union. Today, a narrower, more defensive nationalism increasingly displaces that broader continental perspective.

Economic hardship has accelerated this shift. When unemployment rises, inflation bites and public services deteriorate, blaming the foreigner next door proves far simpler than fixing the institutions that actually failed. Yet the evidence consistently points elsewhere. Unemployment, inequality and poverty across Africa stem overwhelmingly from structural economic and governance failures, not from migrant populations. Xenophobia solves none of these problems.

This contradiction has become impossible to ignore. Africa simultaneously celebrates the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and advances the African Union’s Protocol on the Free Movement of Persons while permitting anti-migrant sentiment to fester across multiple countries. The Ecowas Free Movement Protocol, which predates Europe’s Schengen arrangement, depends entirely on member states’ willingness to honour it rather than circumvent it. A continental market cannot function if the people meant to trade across borders, staff its institutions and build its infrastructure face hostility upon crossing into new territories. Free movement of goods and capital means little if the people carrying them are treated as suspects. For more context on how xenophobia functions as a form of nationalism across Africa, see https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/2026-08-13-xenophobia-is-becoming-africa-s-new-nationalism-south-africa-is-not-alone/

The African Union must stop treating xenophobia as a crisis requiring reactive statements after violence erupts. It should be addressed as a governance failure in its own right. This requires putting genuine weight behind free movement protocols rather than leaving them partially implemented, establishing early warning systems to identify anti-migrant rhetoric before it turns violent, assisting member states in designing humane migration policies and funding public education campaigns that reconnect people with Pan-Africanism’s original purpose.

Every state has the legitimate right to manage immigration and enforce laws. A clear distinction exists, however, between regulating borders and using them as justification for discrimination, collective punishment or violence based on birthplace. Migration governance built on lawful institutions, transparent rules and genuine regional cooperation represents legitimate sovereignty. Mob violence and political scapegoating do not, regardless of the language used to justify them.

South Africa’s experience should serve as a warning to the entire continent, not an excuse to isolate one nation and move forward unchanged. Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and every other African state carrying its own history of expelling or scapegoating migrants owe the continent the same reckoning that South Africa now faces. If Pan-Africanism is to mean anything beyond a historical footnote, Africa must replace selective outrage with collective responsibility. The question is not whether another country will experience its own wave of xenophobic violence. It is simply which one comes next.