The migrant worker is not your enemy. The system is.
From Lagos to Johannesburg, a letter has crossed borders to name what is happening in South Africa not as isolated disorder but as a wound in the body of African solidarity itself. Joe Ajaero, president of Nigeria's Labour Congress, has called on South Africa's trade union movement to move beyond words and mobilize its power against xenophobic violence that is killing migrant workers and destroying the livelihoods they built through years of honest labor. His argument is ancient and urgent at once: when workers turn against workers, they do not win — they surrender their only real power to those who profit from their division.
- Migrant workers from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Somalia, and Nigeria are being murdered and dispossessed in South Africa, not for any wrongdoing but for the circumstance of their birth across a colonial border.
- Security forces have largely stood aside, a passivity that NLC President Joe Ajaero reads not as failure but as complicity — a state that watches and does nothing is a state that has chosen a side.
- Ajaero's letter to COSATU demands mass mobilization, prosecution of perpetrators, compensation for victims' families, and full state protection for migrant workers — rejecting symbolic gestures as insufficient to the scale of the crisis.
- He has called for an emergency continental meeting of African trade union centers to build joint protection mechanisms, arguing that xenophobia left unchallenged in one country will metastasize across the entire continent.
- The deeper alarm is structural: when workers accept the lie that fellow Africans are their enemies, they fracture their own collective bargaining power and hand an unearned victory to capital.
Joe Ajaero, president of Nigeria's Labour Congress, wrote a letter to the Congress of South African Trade Unions that was precise in its urgency and unsparing in its diagnosis. Across South Africa, migrant workers — Zimbabweans, Malawians, Mozambicans, Somalis, Nigerians — were being killed and having their livelihoods destroyed, not for any crime but for the accident of being born on the other side of a border. Ajaero called this what he believed it was: a continental cancer, already spreading, that required immediate and coordinated intervention.
His grievance extended to the South African state itself. Security forces had watched the violence unfold without meaningful intervention, a passivity Ajaero described as indistinguishable from complicity. He was not writing to request a statement from COSATU. He wanted mass mobilization — the full weight of the union movement brought to bear on a government that had so far offered rhetoric in place of protection. He demanded perpetrators be prosecuted, that the families of the dead be compensated, and that workers whose businesses and homes had been destroyed be made whole.
Beyond the immediate crisis, Ajaero identified a deeper fracture. Xenophobia does not only destroy lives — it destroys working-class unity. When workers are persuaded that a fellow African from across a border is their enemy rather than their ally, they weaken themselves and strengthen those who profit from their division. The myth that migrant workers cause poverty, he argued, is a poison that must be actively dismantled, not left to fade on its own.
To that end, Ajaero called for an emergency meeting of African trade union centers across the continent, aiming to build joint mechanisms for protecting migrant workers and ensuring that violence could no longer flourish in isolation. He urged COSATU to lead a sustained campaign of education and sensitization — in union halls, workplaces, and communities — carrying a message both simple and radical: the migrant worker is not your enemy. Solidarity across borders, Ajaero insisted, is not sentiment. It is the only foundation on which workers' power can be built and sustained.
Joe Ajaero, president of Nigeria's Labour Congress, sat down to write a letter that would not be ignored. On the other end was the Congress of South African Trade Unions in Johannesburg—a sister organization that Ajaero believed had the power and the obligation to act. The letter was urgent, almost desperate in its precision. Across South Africa, migrant workers were being killed. Not for crimes they had committed, but for the accident of their birth on the wrong side of a colonial border. Zimbabweans, Malawians, Mozambicans, Somalis, Nigerians—men and women who had built lives through years of labor were watching those lives burn.
Ajaero's diagnosis was stark: xenophobia in South Africa was not a local problem. It was a cancer, he wrote, and if left untreated in one place, it would spread across the entire continent. Already, he noted, the pustules were visible elsewhere. The violence was not random. It was systematic enough that security forces could have stopped it but did not—a passivity that Ajaero read as something worse than indifference. It looked like complicity.
What Ajaero wanted from COSATU was not a statement. Statements were easy. Press releases cost nothing. He wanted mass mobilization. He wanted the union to use its considerable weight to force the South African government into action—real action, not rhetoric. He wanted perpetrators prosecuted. He wanted families of the dead compensated. He wanted workers whose livelihoods had been destroyed to be made whole. And he wanted the state to deploy its full resources to protect migrant workers and their property, not to abandon them to the streets.
But Ajaero's letter pointed to something deeper than the immediate crisis. He saw in the xenophobic violence a fracture in working-class unity itself. When workers turn on workers, when they accept the lie that a fellow African from across a border is their enemy rather than their ally, they weaken their own power. They hand victory to capital. The myth that migrant workers cause poverty—that they are the problem rather than victims of the same system—was a poison that had to be actively countered. It would not die on its own.
So Ajaero called for an emergency meeting of African trade union centers, organizations that spanned the continent and represented millions of workers. The goal was to build joint mechanisms for protecting migrant workers, to create structures that would make it harder for violence to flourish in isolation. If unions across Africa moved together, if they spoke with one voice and backed that voice with the threat of coordinated action, the calculation in South Africa might change.
He called on COSATU to lead what he termed a mass educational and sensitization campaign—in every union hall, every community, every workplace. The message was simple but radical: the migrant worker is not your enemy. The system that impoverishes you both is. Break the racist myth. Organize the pushback. Change the mindset before it destroys what workers have built together across the continent.
What Ajaero was describing was not charity or moral hand-wringing. It was self-interest, properly understood. Xenophobia weakens the working class. It fractures collective bargaining power. It serves only those who profit from division. The letter was a call to remember that solidarity across borders is not sentimental—it is the foundation of any real power workers might have.
Citas Notables
We are compelled by the blood of our fellow black workers, Zimbabwean, Malawian, Mozambican, Somali, Nigerian, and others, who are being murdered, not for any crime, but for the sin of being African in Africa.— Joe Ajaero, NLC President
Xenophobia fractures working-class unity and weakens our collective bargaining power against capital. We must organise a pushback against this latest eruption and change the mindset that propels it before it destroys our collective unity across the continent.— Joe Ajaero, NLC President
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why did Ajaero frame this as a continental problem rather than just a South African one?
Because he understood that xenophobia doesn't stay in one place. If workers in South Africa accept the idea that their neighbors from other African countries are the enemy, that logic spreads. Other countries start thinking the same way. The whole continent fragments.
He seems to be saying that security forces did nothing. Is that an accusation of deliberate inaction?
Yes. He calls their passivity complicity. When police and soldiers have the power to stop violence and don't, the question becomes why. Either they're ordered not to, or they don't care, or they agree with it. Any of those is a form of participation.
What's the practical difference between a press release and mass mobilization?
A press release is words. Mass mobilization is bodies in the street, workers refusing to work, unions threatening economic action. It's the difference between saying something matters and proving you're willing to sacrifice for it.
He keeps returning to this idea that migrant workers are victims of the same system. Why is that framing important?
Because it reframes the entire conflict. If you believe migrants are stealing your jobs, you blame them. If you understand you're both trapped in the same exploitative system, you blame the system. One leads to violence. The other leads to solidarity.
What does he mean by breaking the racist myth?
The myth that a fellow African from across a border is your enemy. It's racist because it treats nationality as more important than class. It's a myth because it's not true—the migrant worker isn't causing your poverty. The system is.
Is there any chance this emergency meeting actually happens?
That depends on whether unions across Africa see their own interest in it. If they do, yes. If they see it as Nigeria's problem, no. Ajaero is betting they'll see it as everyone's problem.