Lethabo Sithole

Business, Trade & Investment Law & Policy girlie. Crazy about Africa and her people | Part-time shopaholic, full-time wanderer 🌍

[Lethabo Sithole @lethaboPJ]

My desire for peace eclipses every other hunger these days. I just want to live a wholesome, fulfilling, peaceful life and enjoy being God’s sugar baby.

[KMalatji @KMalatji]

Don’t waste the best days of your life waiting for the best days of your life.

[Africa First @AfricaFirsts]

South African 🇿🇦 star Ime Okon speaks on choosing to represent Bafana Bafana instead of Super Eagles of Nigeria 🇳🇬.

He says South Africa means everything to him.

Born and raised in South Africa, with a South African mother.

He is in the World Cup squad

[Andreas Peschke @AmbPeschke]

Ithemba lisaphila.

Great fight, Bafana! 🇿🇦⚽️

#FIFAWorldCup

[Giza @Givenkazeni]

Makgopa
Appollis Mofokeng Maseko
Adams Mbatha
Modiba Mbokazi Makhanya Mudau

[Kimbo @Keneilwe__]

sana Please help us @NelsonMandela

[Lesilo Rula @kay_mahapa]

What are we showing the world guys???

[Mbekezeli @MbekezeliMB]

Wow, iBafana Bafana yaze yazijabulisa izitha zethu. Yabukisa ngathi.

[Lethabo Sithole @lethaboPJ]

Guys, why isn’t Relebohile Mofokeng playing?

[Lethabo Sithole @lethaboPJ]

@africatechie @iccwbo Wow, massive congratulations Auntie Becky! 👏🏾

[Rebecca Enonchong @africatechie]

First African woman Vice-Chair in the ICC’s century-old history. 💃🏽💃🏽

My unfiltered, truth-to-power voice just got a much louder platform! Thanks for the trust @iccwbo!!

[KMalatji @KMalatji]

A national team is not a football club, it is supported through thick and thin.

[Lesilo Rula @kay_mahapa]

Modimo you have forsaken me in front of 1 billion people. 1 billion.

[Lesilo Rula @kay_mahapa]

Kopa Ashwaganda!

[Ofentse Donald Davhie @DonaldDavhie]

South Africa’s Ambassador to the US, Zohran Mamdani.

[Dr. Hood Possum @DrLungi_Mashele]

Getting a PhD will teach you not to opine on someone’s thesis unless you’re asked to examine it, because:

1. You know the hell that went into that submission, defence and examination

2. A PhD thesis can be so niche, maybe 20 people in the country can adequately critique it.

[Mbekezeli @MbekezeliMB]

The African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values is a project of US right wing Christian nationalists who want to impose their ideology on Africa. They sponsor anti-LGBTI bills in Uganda, Ghana and other African states.
The South African Constitution prohibits discrimination

[Ken Opalo @kopalo]

You can’t projectize industrial policy: https://t.co/HIluf72jpv

[Roland-Garros @rolandgarros]

Shining, as always ✨

#RolandGarros

[Brett Herron 🇿🇦🍉 @brettherron]

The @SANDF_ZA refusal to provide previously classified apartheid era documents - that are 40 to 45 years old (and were apparently declassified by the apartheid SADF) - is outrageous & baffling. What security risk could the apartheid government military strategy pose today?
The documents should be in the Apartheid Museum - telling the untold stories - not locked in a safe.
Why does the current-day SANDF want them restricted?
#CraddockFour #Craddock4 #SANDF #Apartheid

[Farida Bemba Nabourema @Farida_N]

I've just published "South Africa Is Expelling Africans Today. Ghana, Nigeria, Mauritania, Gabon Did It Yesterday. When Will We Stop?"

In this piece, I examine the mechanism through which African governments have, across decades and across borders, converted their own failures into someone else's presence. Xenophobia in Africa is not a South African pathology. It is a continental pattern grounded in our colonial and postcolonial history.

"The pattern is always identical. The corruption, the mismanagement of state resources, the growing public discontent are always prior, and the xenophobia is always subsequent. But to stop the analysis at corruption and mismanagement is itself a form of incompleteness, because in many of these cases the domestic political class was not operating in a vacuum. It was operating within a macroeconomic framework designed and actively promoted by international financial institutions whose structural adjustment programmes, from the 1980s onward, systematically dismantled the public sectors, the price controls, the subsidies and the developmental state instruments that postcolonial governments had built, however imperfectly, as buffers against exactly the kind of mass precarity that makes scapegoating politically viable.

The corruption of the governing class accelerated what structural adjustment had already set in motion. Together, they produced populations with shrinking economic futures, collapsing public services and a legitimate fury that had to go somewhere. The scapegoating of foreigners is the political management of that fury, a management whose actual causes, both domestic and international, the governing class has every incentive to obscure and every institutional capacity to redirect.

The Mechanism in Its Full Ugliness

The mechanism is always the same, and it has three stages. First, a political class extracts from the public resources it was entrusted to develop, operating within and actively enabled by global economic policies that structural adjustment programmes from the 1980s onward had already hollowed out from the inside, dismantling price controls, privatising public utilities, cutting subsidies and removing the developmental instruments that had given postcolonial states whatever limited capacity they possessed to absorb economic shocks and protect their populations from the worst consequences of commodity dependence and external debt. The conditions of unemployment, poverty, infrastructure failure and social precarity that result are therefore never purely the product of domestic corruption alone. They are the joint product of domestic predation and an international economic order that has long extracted more from Africa than it has returned.

Second, the frustration produced by these compounded conditions is redirected, through political rhetoric, media framing and the deliberate mobilisation of existing social anxieties about belonging and scarcity, toward a visible and vulnerable population that can be blamed for conditions it did not create and from which it has, in most cases, also suffered.

Third, the political class that produced the conditions escapes accountability, because the public conversation has been successfully redirected toward the scapegoat, and the structural analysis that would implicate both the domestic governing class and the international economic arrangements that sustain it never gains sufficient traction to become politically dangerous to either.

Foreigners are the ideal scapegoat for this mechanism because they are precisely visible enough to be identified and precisely powerless enough to be attacked without political cost. They do not vote. They have limited legal protections. They often lack the community networks that would enable organised resistance. And they can be portrayed, with just enough superficial plausibility to be politically effective, as competitors for the jobs, the housing, the commercial opportunities and the public services that the corruption of their host governments has made genuinely scarce. The Ghanaian or Zimbabwean street vendor in Johannesburg did not create South African unemployment, just as the Nigerian trader in Accra did not create Ghana’s economic difficulties in the 1960s. In each case, migrants became convenient targets for crises they neither caused nor controlled.

The Real Author of African Poverty

Across generations and across borders, African governments have demonstrated a remarkable talent for dissipating public wealth, a talent that might inspire admiration were it not responsible for so much human suffering(...).

Before European partition, people moved across this continent with a freedom that the artificial precision of colonial cartography was specifically designed to destroy. The borders that today separate Ghana from Togo, Nigeria from Niger, South Africa from Zimbabwe were not drawn by the people who lived on either side of them. They were drawn in Berlin in 1884 by men who sorted human communities, languages, ethnic groups and centuries of shared civilisation into administrative units according to the logic of European imperial competition and not the logic of African human geography.

Postcolonial politics transformed these imposed borders into the primary unit of belonging, and African governments have enforced them against their own continental siblings with a thoroughness the colonisers who drew them would have found entirely satisfying. The Ewe, Dagomba and Akan, divided between Ghana, Togo, Benin and Côte d’Ivoire by lines drawn in Europe by men who could not have named their villages. The Hausa and the Fulani, split between Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger. The Wolof, parcelled between Senegal and Gambia. The Tswana divided between Botswana and South Africa. The Swazi between Eswatini and South Africa. The Ndebele between Zimbabwe and South Africa. The Lozi between Zambia and Botswana. The Chewa between Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique. The Maasai split between Kenya and Tanzania. The Somali fragmented across Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti, a dispossession so complete that it contributed directly to a century of conflict that the international community has consistently misread as tribal pathology rather than colonial cartography.

These communities did not become South African or Botswanan, Nigerian or Nigerien, Kenyan or Tanzanian because their histories pointed in that direction. They became so because partition required it, and because postcolonial governments, having inherited the colonial state’s territorial logic, chose to reproduce it rather than interrogate it. Communities that predate the borders defining them were made foreigners in landscapes their ancestors had shaped for centuries. And the governments presiding over that dispossession have had the audacity, at every xenophobic crisis, to invoke the language of African brotherhood.

We did not create these borders. But we have used them to dispossess, expel and scapegoat each other with a consistency that serves the interests of every corrupt government on this continent and the interests of no ordinary African people anywhere.

The Moral of a History Nobody Wants to Own

No African government raising its voice against the xenophobic violence in South Africa today has clean hands. Ghana expelled half a million people while its own governance failures went unexamined. Nigeria expelled two million while its oil revenues were being systematically looted. Zambia, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania, Gabon: every corner of this continent has, at some moment of economic or political stress produced by the failures of its own political class, reached for the same instrument. The foreign national as the answer to a question whose real answer would require the powerful to account for themselves.

This is the function that xenophobia serves in the political landscape of African governance, and it is a function that will continue to be served as long as African populations can be induced to direct their frustration downward toward the most vulnerable people among them rather than upward toward the class that has consistently failed them(...).

Read full piece:
https://t.co/X8tQKGzgxl