…South Africa is nothing without Africa, he warns
MTN Group Chairman, Mcebisi Jonas, has strongly condemned anti-foreigner sentiment in South Africa, describing it as a symptom of state failure cynically exploited by self-serving politicians.
He made the declaration while speaking at the funeral of Zimbabwean-born activist Thokozani Damasane.
In remarks that have circulated widely across civil society, the former deputy finance minister told mourners that removing foreign nationals would do nothing to solve the country’s deep-seated crises.
“Foreigners can leave tomorrow – inequality will be with us. Foreigners will leave tomorrow – unemployment will be with us. Foreigners will leave tomorrow – our police will remain corrupt.
Foreigners will leave tomorrow – our politicians will still be concerned with one thing: being elected and re-elected,” Jonas said.
He placed responsibility squarely on the state’s failure to manage borders, enforce law, or deliver education, arguing this created fertile ground for political manipulation.
“When people feel the burn, they become vulnerable to politicians whose sole purpose is to be elected and re-elected,” he said. “Some of them have no credibility whatsoever. But they lead marches and tell our people that the problem is not us – it is foreigners.”
Jonas, who chairs the Johannesburg-headquartered telecommunications giant operating across 19 African markets, also delivered a sustained historical critique of tribalism, which he described as a colonial technology designed to divide and rule.
“The tribe is a product of colonial powers,” he said, arguing this logic had mutated into the engine driving xenophobic violence.
“You would see in the streets, it’s no longer about whether you are from South Africa or not from South Africa. It’s about the tribe, it’s about who you are, you are not like us, and therefore, we have to persecute you. Something fundamental has been lost in our country.”
He was equally direct in his criticism of liberation movements for sustaining ethnic divisions for political purposes, calling on the country to banish identity politics and ethno-nationalism.
The speech, which drew on philosophy and personal memory, opened with a question Jonas said came to him while driving to the service.
He had been listening to voices calling for foreigners to leave, and the contrast with the life he was about to commemorate stopped him.
“I was thinking, what is home to Damasane? Because I understand, and I understood very early in life, that home is where humanity is. It is about humanness.”
He described Damasane, who relocated from Zimbabwe during the post-apartheid transition, as arriving “as an outcast” yet choosing to commit himself entirely to South Africa’s struggles.
“He immersed himself deeply into the struggles, into the pains of South Africans, and he became one of us,” Jonas said.
He recounted a conversation where Damasane told a young man challenging his presence:
“Just wait fifteen or twenty years. You will also want to leave your country.” Jonas said those words now carry a weight Damasane may not have anticipated.
“As I stand up today, I look at South Africa. The level of oppression and inequality, the level of exclusion of our people, the level of corruption, the betrayal of the dream of liberation – those words of Damasane ring very loud in my ears.”
Jonas closed with a call for continental solidarity, arguing that South Africa’s economic fortunes were intertwined with the rest of Africa.
He said: “We are a nation embedded in Africa. And without Africa, our growth as a country – economically – our fortune is intertwined with the growth of Africa. South Africa is nothing without Africa. And Africa is nothing without South Africa.”
His intervention comes at a sensitive moment for South Africa’s continental relationships, with episodes of xenophobic violence having previously led to diplomatic protests and boycott campaigns against South African businesses, including MTN.
Invoking Frantz Fanon, Jonas said Damasane, like the Martinique-born theorist of the Algerian Revolution, had entered a society as a structural outsider and chose commitment over comfort.
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it. Damasane understood the mission. And he did not betray it,” Jonas quoted
