The Big Read: Since its independence from Britain in 1966, Botswana has hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees from Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa. And in these many decades of harbouring foreigners, there was never a single incident of an outbreak of violence between its nationals and the refugees.

The same can be said about other SADC countries that won their freedom at different times, but certainly decades before we won ours. They also accommodated foreign nationals.

Within 13 years of the attainment of freedom in South Africa, there had been some brutal attacks on African foreigners in our country, which is widely attributed to negrophobia [fear of, or contempt for, black people].

For several weeks now, the air has been thick with rumours to the effect that negrophobic violence would be unleashed once the soccer World Cup ended.

Those of us who lived outside our country for many years as refugees can attest to the fact that our people are no more negrophobic than their counterparts elsewhere on our continent.

The big difference between South Africa and the other countries in Southern Africa lies in regulation, management and administration. Whereas our neighbours manage the presence of foreigners in their territories, we are an awful shambles, leaving the poorer sections of our society to pick up the pieces.

In Botswana and Zimbabwe, which I know of first-hand, the immigration systems are efficient, effective and strict, making it very difficult to overstay.

Asylum seekers are interviewed quickly, first by the police who, on satisfying themselves about the genuineness of the individual's refugee status, hand him over to a statutory body created for that purpose that works hand-in-glove with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

In Botswana, for example, once an individual has been accepted as a genuine refugee, he is issued with an identity document and taken to a refugee camp, where he is provided with accommodation, weekly food rations and a monthly stipend.

Refugees are not allowed to leave the camp unless they have a job, admission to an educational institution or some other legitimate business outside the camp.

Foreigners cannot just build a shack anywhere they like, or engage in hawking or any such informal business.

Employers can hire a foreigner only if they can prove that they cannot find a local to do the job.

The result of all these measures has been the absence of friction between Batswanans and foreigners for many decades.

Now, consider what we have in South Africa: our immigration department is a shambles. Foreigners can enter the country and disappear. Some buy South African identity documents and try to pass themselves off as citizens. We have nationals of established democracies claiming to be political refugees in this country. That would not happen in a country like Botswana.

Those seeking political asylum are not processed promptly and efficiently, hence the long queues at Home Affairs and the sad stories many migrants tell. No accommodation, food or stipends are given to migrants.

How do we expect people arriving in our country without housing, employment and food to survive?

Many enter our informal settlements to compete with our poorest of the poor for space on which to erect their shack; they compete with the locals in running informal businesses, such as hawking in the streets of our cities and towns; they take any job for the kind of remuneration locals would not accept, thereby causing resentment.

Some employers prefer foreigners who are undocumented, cheap, desperate, do not belong to unions and cannot afford to have an "attitude".

What we see in our country is not negrophobia but a fierce struggle for survival by the poor, though the methods some of them employ, such as beating foreigners and looting their property, are totally unacceptable and should be condemned and punished.

There are hundreds of thousands of African foreigners working in our restaurants, hotels, banks, insurance companies, engineering outfits and mines, and in many other areas of the economy, without any problems. They are well documented and are employed under properly regulated arrangements.

The paucity of regulation, management and administration of migration affairs by the state has pitted our poor against their counterparts from elsewhere, producing an explosive situation.

Criminals take advantage of this to engage in their own sordid activities.

This poor management of foreign immigrants by the state creates an environment in which other social ills thrive.

For example, bribing the police to avoid arrest for being without the necessary documents, or Home Affairs officials to obtain South African identity documents, or local-government officials to obtain an RDP house illegally, or employers exploiting the cheap labour of foreigners.

The government policy of unmanaged integration has noble intentions but it is not working.

And it is unfair to our poor citizens and their foreign counterparts.

• Mangena is a former president of the Azanian People's Organisation and a former minister of science and technology