A deadline of June 30 hangs over African migrants in South Africa. Vigilante groups, among them one called March and March, have reportedly told foreigners to leave by then, and migrants have already been harassed and ordered to “go back home.” Ghanaian businessman and philanthropist Seidu Agongo answered with a single question in an opinion column published by Graphic Online, Modern Ghana and The Ghanaian Chronicle: if Africans must go, where exactly should they go?
Agongo calls the question rhetorical only on the surface. He says South Africa’s current ugliness forces the continent to look at itself.
Borders drawn by outsiders
His starting point is the map. The lines that decide who belongs and who does not, he writes, were never African choices. Colonial powers drew them for administration and extraction. Now Africans cite those same lines to push each other out, which in his view keeps alive a split identity that was imposed to weaken the continent.
Before colonial rule, he argues, people traded and lived across wide territories shaped by culture and commerce. He wants younger South Africans to remember that other Africans gave sacrifices to help end apartheid.
Why people move
Agongo treats migration as an ordinary reaction to unequal development. People look for opportunity, security and dignity, and those are spread unevenly. Many migrants head to South Africa because work and business openings exist there. They take jobs, start businesses and fill gaps. Ghanaians and Nigerians do the same at home, moving to study, work or invest.
Telling them to go back home, he says, solves nothing. It dodges the deeper economic problems.
He does not wave away local anger. Unemployment, poverty and inequality hit South Africa’s young people hard, and he calls that “serious and urgent.” But blaming fellow Africans is “both inaccurate and dangerous,” he writes, and aiming that frustration at vulnerable migrants only deepens the crisis.
The economic argument
The column makes a case from resources and trade. Gold from Ghana, cobalt and copper from the Democratic Republic of Congo, lithium from Zimbabwe and bauxite from Guinea all feed global supply chains, and demand grows with electric vehicles, renewable energy and advanced technology. Agongo wants that to mean industrial development and value addition at home, not only raw exports.
That needs unity, he says. He points to the African Continental Free Trade Area, built to lower barriers between African economies, and says it rings hollow if Africans are unwelcome in each other’s markets. A continent that splits along national lines bargains from weakness, he writes, and lets outsiders set terms.
Writing as a businessman, he adds a practical point. Many migrants in South Africa run small businesses, trade and provide services. Removing them will not by itself produce jobs for South Africans, he says, and could close small enterprises and disrupt supply chains in communities that are already struggling.
South Africa’s standing
South Africa has long been seen as a gateway economy that draws investment, tourism and talent. Agongo says lasting hostility toward other Africans puts that reputation, and the investment tied to it, at risk.
He is also critical of African governments arranging repatriation of their citizens from South Africa, calling it deeply unfortunate. In his view it cuts against what Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela stood for.
His appeal to Pretoria is specific. Authorities should talk to young people, deal with grievances through lawful channels, and refuse mob action and unlawful expulsions. “The rule of law must prevail,” he writes, “but so too must the principles of dignity, fairness and African solidarity.”
His own answer to the opening question is that Africans should not be sent away from one another at all. He describes Ghanaians pushed out of Nigeria or Nigerians pushed out of South Africa as the wrong direction, and calls instead for deeper integration and stronger cooperation among people who share what he calls “a shared destiny.”
Sources
- Africans must go, but to where? – Seidu Agongo writes
- Africans Must Go …. But To Where?
- *Africans must go …. But to where?* – The Ghanaian Chronicle
