Whenever something goes wrong in SA, be it the collapse of infrastructure, the spiralling crime rate or the growing threat of the Islamic State on our shores, the go-to rhetoric is to blame a foreigner.
An investigation by TimesLIVE, published on Monday, exposed an alarming situation in which the global terror group is increasingly entrenching itself in SA.
The four investigative reports revealed that:
- For three years government has been repatriating South Africans, who fought for IS in Syria, after the group’s caliphate was defeated in 2019;
- An international counter-terrorism investigation into how small-scale SA money transfer companies, used largely by foreigners to send money home, was exploited by IS supporters;
- SA faces major challenges in the detection, investigation and prosecution of terrorists and their financiers (only two IS supporters in SA have been convicted since 2010); and
- Since 2017 leaders of a peace-loving émigré Ethiopian community, including imams, have been assassinated at an alarming rate by IS supporters in SA for speaking out against and condemning the group.
When the investigations were published on Monday, many South Africans, including Patriotic Alliance leader Gayton McKenzie, were quick to beat the xenophobic rhetoric drum.
On Twitter, McKenzie, his followers and many “peace-loving” South Africans selectively zoomed in on the reports.
People should be beating the drums, banging on doors and demanding answers, yes, but not from foreigners.
McKenzie, with a link to one of the reports, tweeted: “You called us xenophobic when we said that this tuck shops are funding terrorism.”
A fire was lit and within hours people were calling for foreigners to be booted out of the country.
Sadly, but almost predictably, instead of taking a step back and looking at all the reports collectively, including the assassination of the Oromo community members, who seem to be the only ones speaking out against IS, many chose to focus on just one of the stories: how SA-designed financial services — used largely by foreigners — were being exploited by IS supporters.
People should be beating the drums, banging on doors and demanding answers, yes, but not from foreigners.
What they should be doing is knocking on the door of government and demanding accountability.
They should be asking why South Africans who fought for and aided IS in Syria have been allowed to return with no threat of prosecution, given freshly printed identity cards and allowed to resettle.
They should also be asking why the antiterrorism units in the SA Police Service and the Directorate of Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks) are so understaffed — Gauteng’s Crimes Against the State Unit only has five counter-terrorism investigators, with similar numbers in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.
Why is it that the SA government, according to international body Financial Action Task Force, seems so uninterested in dealing with the issue of terrorism financing?
These are the questions everyone in SA, locals and foreigners, should be demanding that government answer.
Yet sadly, and again predictably, it is far too easy to blame a foreigner and stoke SA’s burning xenophobic embers than demand real accountability from the people in charge of protecting all who live in SA from a very real and growing terror danger.
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