“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Winston Churchill, paraphrasing the Spanish writer George Santayana, said this as part of a speech to the British parliament in 1948, three years after the allied forces defeated Hitler and the Nazis.
Churchill combined superior oratory skills and mastery of political strategy into a powerful motivational tool that propelled Britain and her allies to triumph against Nazism.
He was an imperfect fellow who drank and smoked himself to death, but Britain’s wartime prime minister is a great example of how a charismatic leader can galvanise society towards a greater good.
When looking at the political leaders we have, one wonders what type of a world we would have shaped had Churchill been a leader of our time. At home we have to make do with the monotonous indecisiveness of Cyril Ramaphosa; the animated posture of a John Steenhuisen who mistakes an obsession with litigation for effective opposition; Julius Malema’s permanently misdirected rage; Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s self-centred nostalgia; and a plethora of single-seat parties devoid of principle or ideology, but carried forth by their uninspiring leaders’ desperation for a monthly salary.
When there’s a vacuum in leadership, someone out there is bound to fill it and it may not be someone we like. Nhlanhla Lux Dlamini has seen this void and is exploiting it with his Operation Dudula movement.
When there’s a vacuum in leadership, someone out there is bound to fill it and it may not be someone we like. Nhlanhla Lux Dlamini has seen this void and is exploiting it with his Operation Dudula movement.
Let me declare from the onset that I abhor xenophobia and the targeting of African economic migrants who are seeking a life here because of a dearth of leadership in their countries. Leaving your home in search of non-guaranteed fortunes in a different land — even a neighbouring one — is daunting, especially if you are poorly educated and unskilled.
But migration is a fact of life. It is next to impossible to keep people out of a SA separated from its neighbours by porous borders when even the great and well-protected nations of the US, Britain, France and Germany are failing to curb undocumented in-migration.
We laughed Donald Trump off the stage for thinking a higher wall would stop Mexicans from crossing over.
Also, no country ever advanced without tapping into skilled intellectual capital from outside its borders. That is why the fast-tracking of critical skills visas by the department of home affairs is crucial to restructuring the economy.
Be that as it may, I’m no fan of open borders because better developed and democratic nations end up unfairly bearing the burden of their less developed and less democratic neighbours. Proper border control is also a security imperative as countries need to know who they let in and out at all times.
It is for these and other reasons that I refuse to dismiss Dlamini and his Dudula movement as just a bunch of xenophobic hooligans. I choose to engage with, rather than pour scorn on, their cause, because there are truths in their disorganised messaging that we cannot run away from.
The latest version of Stats SA’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey, released on Tuesday, reminded us that the number of unemployed people increased by 278,000 to 7.9-million in the last quarter of 2021. There are now 3.8-million discouraged job seekers, 17.8-million of them falling into the “not economically active population” bracket. We all know a disproportionate number of the unemployed and discouraged are young South Africans. They are at home and have lost hope. They no longer scour newspapers and websites for job ads; they just glide their way through life with no knowledge of what tomorrow holds. They have been failed by their leaders, who wake up each day to repeat the mistakes of yesterday.
They no longer scour newspapers and websites for job ads; they just glide their way through life with no knowledge of what tomorrow holds.
Dlamini is no Churchill, but in him they see the leadership they have been thirsting for.
South Africans didn’t just wake up hating illegal foreigners, but when opportunities are few, charity must begin at home. That’s what all countries do for their citizens.
Take the hospitality industry, for example, especially restaurants. We all saw how, over the years, South African waiters, barmen, cooks and cleaners were replaced by (often undocumented) Zimbabwean and Malawian migrants who were happy to work for tips only. Did this industry assume South Africans sitting at home were going to just accept this? What happened to reserving unskilled jobs for South Africans?
Economic migrants have begun dominating in the agricultural sector as drought-battered farmers look to save on wages. Other industries are taking their cue from this and replacing South Africans with cheaper labour from outside.
Our leaders should be engaging Operation Dudula and the public about these legitimate concerns, before people take the law into their own hands. I have no desire to again see deadly attacks on foreigners and we urgently need proactive leadership to diffuse these tensions.
But as Churchill warned 74 years ago, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
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