kagablog

By: Pule Lechesa.

(Pule Lechesa is the Editor-in- chief of Tshwane University of Technology (TUT’s) campus newspaper called UPDATE. He is also the News Editor of TUT fm’s current affairs show Live@12. Other than being a journalist Lechesa is an internationally acclaimed author of many books.)

(The former E TV award winning Sports journalist now a journalism lecture at TUT, Mr Tshamano Makhadi with Update newspaper’s journalist Sipho Dzimba (in the middle) and the Editor-in-Chief of Update Pule Lechesa (wearing shades) outside Cape Town parliament.)

Update News held a postmortem of the recent barbaric acts that accompanied the recent attacks on immigrants of African origin in our so called ‘Rainbow Nation’ (South Africa). We want to say enough is enough. When I first learnt of these inhuman acts they surely scared the living day light out of my Africanist life. I was in Cape Town when I saw the front page of the Star Newspaper carrying an article of a man being burnt to death. I asked myself if this animalistic act was happening in the full view of the passer-by children or not. These kinds of things de-sensitize our children. We make them witness with downright disbelief, people of dying like animals before their two naked eyes, helpless women and children running helter-skelter for their lives. This is very much an unpalatable fly in the ointment. What happened to the spirit of “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
The doers of these acts are physically liberated but mentally oppressed. We need to set them free before they paint a permanent wrong picture about all the South Africans. Let me use this space to decolonize and jog up their memory lest they forget where we come from as the RAINBOW nation. When Apartheid was rife in South Africa these other black African countries were our brothers and sisters’ keepers, helped, gave them political asylum, provided our liberation movements’ military wings with military training. South Africa is known for oozing with dollops of humanity, Ubuntu. Why do we have to treat our brothers like this?
Xenophobia is an ill-wind that blows us, the once known as a reconciliatory nation, into the quagmire of barbarity. When celebrating African day President Mbeki asked the South Africans to bury their heads in shame at these gratuitous attacks. I understand where the President comes from. This statement does not mean that we should be like ostriches that bury their heads when the going gets tough. We must face this challenge and try to come up with salutary solutions. We must stand our ground and rebuke every one who is condoning these acts. These xenophobic attacks affect every human being; hence the solution must not be left for government alone. It is not an esoteric phenomenon.
We have heard our colleagues asking ‘who is to be blamed for these xenophobic attacks’. Is it the media since they used to give them gamut publicity? We saw them being shown around the world on international channels such as – New York Times, CNN, and so forth. Sometime last year prior these attacks our local newspapers such as Sowetan once carried the headline that read thus; “Zim Invasion” and the Saturday Star “Zim tsunami floods SA”. Some critics are using this as their premise to ague that media is to be blamed. They claim that such headlines prompted South Africans to have negative paradigms towards immigrants of African origin in the country. I beg to differ we need not to zero in on the deterministic theory what about humanistic.
We are disappointed to see that the student leaders in our respective Universities are not doing anything. They should be seen in the vanguard organizing anti-xenophobia campaigns. Most of the people that have been arrested are young people. This shows that student leaders must be the ones championing the fight against these xenophobic attacks. All they know is to make headline news for the wrong reasons. South Africa is known worldwide as a reconciliatory country, a cradle of human values, a place where the oppressors and the previously oppressed live together harmoniously. Let us not allow the evil forces to make a continent torn apart!
This prejudice is committed under the fallacy that immigrants of African origin are here in Msanzi to steal South Africans’ jobs, (which jobs as they always complain that there is high employment rate?), commit crimes and are the causes of high divorces rate on South African families. Was South Africa a crime Free country before the influx of foreigners in our country? I know so many foreigners that are not as bad as we portray them. Most of them bring skills and create jobs out of nothing. These people are hard workers and above all they are good in what ever they set their minds on hence some of the South Africans hate them. To mention but a few, award winning author Omoseye Bolaji has selflessly taken Free State literature to high dimension and Dr Gideon Tibed is one the best Mass Communication Lectures I know. He oozes with dollops of humanity. It is high time that we do away with stereotype and look at the foreigners as our brothers and sisters.
Join me in proclaiming that: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!! Xenophobia is an ill-wind that blows us nothing except shame. Let us come together an open a new leaf that will paint the right picture about the true colours of South Africans. I subscribe to Mzwake “The people’s Poet” Mbuli’s line of thinking when he says “killing another man is not an act of heroism but is an act of cowardice.”

(Courtesy of Tshwane University of Technology’s (TUT) campus newspaper UPDATE.)