Xenophobia threatens African economies
When African states started gaining independence in the late 1950s, their antidote to the destructive Balkanisation of their continent under colonialism was pan-Africanism.
Championed by leaders such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, pan-Africanism proclaimed that Africans had a common history and that their destiny belonged together.
The concept gained a new burst of life in the first decade of this century when Thabo Mbeki was President of South Africa, a nation that had overcome the poisonous doctrine of apartheid, or “apartness”.
Leaders of Africa’s more than 50 countries, he advised, should shun the “atomistic nation-state” and “zero-sum sovereignty” in favour of interdependence. Put simply, strength lay in unity. Now there is a new force abroad in Africa — xenophobia.
In South Africa, a magnet for immigrants from all over the continent, foreigners have been targeted in a wave of what many have characterised as xenophobic attacks.
In Johannesburg, Pretoria and elsewhere this month, 12 people were killed as foreign-owned shops and businesses were ransacked.
In Cape Town, several haulage trucks - associated with non-unionised foreign labour - were petrol bombed.
Hate speech circulated on social media, threatening to burn to death all foreigners who did not leave the country immediately.
This anti-foreign unrest has met an anti-South African backlash across the continent.
South African trucks have been attacked in Mozambique.
The radio station Hot FM Zambia banned South African music.
And Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s President, was booed at former Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s funeral in Harare until he apologised for his countrymen’s actions.
The biggest reaction has come in Nigeria, which fancies itself the continent’s economic and political heavyweight and more than a match for South Africa.
Nigerian politicians have reacted with fury to the violence, some of which has specifically targeted Nigerians living in South Africa.
Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s President, withdrew his high commissioner from Pretoria in protest and said he stood ready to evacuate Nigerians who wanted to leave.
Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, British-Nigerian co-founder of the African Women’s Development Fund, condemned “Afrophobia”, telling a conference in Stellenbosch this month that it threatened to tarnish South Africa’s liberal credentials.
The leaders of the African National Congress were once keenly aware of the pan-African spirit, which they relied on heavily during the struggle against apartheid.
Shortly after Nelson Mandela was elected President in 1994, he went on an 18-day tour of African countries to thank them for their role in hosting and protecting ANC activists.
Now, some South African leaders seem to have forgotten that history.
Having failed to transform the lives of South Africans, too many have resorted to the rhetoric - familiar in much of the world - of blaming foreigners for their troubles.
Bongani Mkongi, former deputy minister of police, claimed that 80 percent of people living in the Hillbrow district of Johannesburg are foreign.
“South Africans have surrendered their own city to foreign nationals,” he said in a press conference.
Some noted that as violence spread this month, the police were all too often absent.
But the spirit of pan-Africanism is not dead.
Uganda and Ethiopia, among others, have been generous hosts of hundreds of thousands of refugees.
This year saw the launch of the biggest pan-African project of all — the African Continental Free Trade Agreement.
Fifty-four nations have committed to a free trade area with an output of $3,4 trillion in which tariffs on 90 percent of goods will be cut to zero.
African countries trade about 18 percent of goods among themselves, against 59 percent in Asia and 69 percent in Europe, according to the Brookings Institution.
Without economies of scale, many African countries, especially the 16 landlocked ones, cannot free themselves from extractive relationships with trading partners who pull out raw commodities and dump back manufactured goods.
Studies show the percentage of value added rises as intraregional trade increases.
Free trade is no panacea, but it may be the best chance many African nations have for development.
If leaders allow xenophobia to get out of hand, the whole free trade project will be threatened.
For it to work, African nations will have to take a liberal attitude towards the movement of people as well as goods and services.
“Pan-Africanism is something that we talk about,” says Sipho Pityana, chairman of AngloGold Ashanti.
“But we act nationalist.”
Unless leaders resist the drift to the atomism that Mr Mbeki has warned about, the continental free trade agreement will be stillborn.
David Pilling is the Asia editor of the Financial Times. Feedback: david.pilling@ft.com or Twitter handle @davidpilling