South Africa’s political parties have delivered sharply contrasting reactions to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s national address on illegal immigration, exposing deep divisions over how the country should tackle migration, border security, unemployment and rising tensions involving foreign nationals.
Opposition party ActionSA dismissed the President’s intervention as inadequate and accused the government of failing to confront what it describes as an escalating immigration crisis.
In a statement on Sunday, ActionSA president Herman Mashaba said Ramaphosa had merely repeated policies that had failed for decades.
“Rather than presenting a clear shift in approach, which we believe must anchor on mass deportations and the urgent capacitation of enforcement capacity, the President merely repackaged the same failed and tired talking points that have characterised the ANC’s decades-long failure to secure South Africa’s borders and effectively address illegal immigration,” Mashaba said.
He argued that government commitments to strengthen enforcement would be ineffective while the Border Management Authority remains under-resourced.
“While the Border Management Authority remains underfunded, under equipped and under resourced, any commitment by the President to ramp up enforcement is dead on arrival,” he said.
Mashaba also criticised Ramaphosa for not engaging directly with journalists after the address.
“South Africans deserve answers to questions about what, if anything, is genuinely different in the measures announced today. Instead, the President avoided scrutiny and offered little more than a scripted repetition of the same failed policies.”
The Democratic Alliance (DA), however, welcomed the President’s remarks and endorsed his assertion that South Africa’s economic challenges are not caused by foreign nationals but by a lack of economic growth and job creation.
DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis described the President’s message as timely amid growing tensions around migration.
“This is the right message at a dangerous moment for our country. South Africans must reject xenophobia, uphold our constitutional values, and never allow anger over hardship to become violence against vulnerable people,” Hill-Lewis said.
While backing tougher immigration enforcement, the DA stressed that law enforcement should remain the responsibility of the state.
“People must be in South Africa legally, and the law must be enforced by the state, not by mobs, vigilantes, or politicians who stoke hatred for votes,” he said.
The DA also called for accelerated economic reforms, arguing that unemployment remains the root cause of many of the frustrations driving the immigration debate.
“We must be honest that the deeper answer to this crisis is jobs, growth and a capable state,” Hill-Lewis said.
March and March Movement leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma offered a mixed response, welcoming the fact that Ramaphosa had finally addressed the issue after months of public pressure.
“We would like to acknowledge that finally, after months of asking the president to acknowledge this crisis that we currently face as a country, he has attended to the issue with the attention that it deserves,” she said.
Ngobese-Zuma said the President had correctly identified some of the challenges associated with illegal migration, including crime, employment concerns and the pressure on public resources. However, she questioned whether government fully understands the scale of the problem.
“After having listened to the president, I feel like to him this is more of a political issue than it is a South African human rights issue for South Africans, where they’re dealing with crime, where they’re dealing with unemployment, where they’re dealing with overstretched resources,” she said.
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) delivered one of the strongest criticisms of the President’s intervention, accusing government of responding only after mounting pressure from leaders elsewhere on the African continent.
EFF MP Sam Matiase questioned why the issue had only now been elevated to a national priority.
“What South Africans should ask is, why only now? The president has offered no solution whatsoever to the crisis of immigration,” Matiase said.
He further argued that government had failed to develop a sustainable migration strategy beyond deportations and detention.
“Government had no intention or a system or a strategy of how to deal with this crisis,” he said.
Matiase also accused members of the Government of National Unity of contributing to anti-foreigner sentiment and called on Ramaphosa to take action against leaders he claimed were fuelling xenophobia.
The contrasting responses underscore the growing political contest over immigration policy in South Africa, with parties divided between calls for stricter enforcement and deportations, appeals for economic reform, and concerns over xenophobia and social cohesion.
IOL News
