Africa's Charlatan Patriots: How Scapegoating Migrants Masks Governance Failure

Two weeks ago in Durban, South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa stood before the 46th Summit of the Southern African Development Community and acknowledged a wound that had been bleeding across his nation for years. Xenophobic violence had erupted repeatedly against foreign nationals—Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Ghanaians—and the host nation's leader chose not to look away. He told the assembled delegates that South Africans were ashamed of the discrimination, ill-treatment, and threats their neighbors had endured. He apologized to Mozambique's President Daniel Chapo with what he called humility, recognizing that citizens of his country had committed violence against foreigners on South African soil.

The apology landed poorly. Across the continent, observers greeted it with skepticism born of repetition—South Africa had apologized before, and the violence had returned. Within South Africa itself, anti-immigrant movements like March & March and Operation Dudula rejected the gesture entirely. Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, who leads March & March, told media outlets there was nothing to apologize for. The message was clear: for a growing faction of South Africans, migrants were not victims but threats, and restraint was not virtue but weakness.

What is happening in South Africa is not unique to South Africa. Across the continent, organized campaigns against foreign nationals have become increasingly visible and increasingly bold. In Ghana, the Ghana Union of Traders Association has periodically shuttered Nigerian-owned shops. Protesters in Accra and Kumasi have marched with signs declaring "Nigeria Must Go." These movements target foreign-owned businesses, picket clinics, conduct street-level identity checks. They present themselves as patriotic defense of the nation. Yet beneath the patriotic language lies something else: a politics of scapegoating that substitutes enemies for solutions.

The question that emerges is not whether nations have the right to control their borders—they do—but rather what happens when political actors exploit that right as cover for something deeper. Economic hardship is real: unemployment, inflation, poverty are grinding facts of life across much of Africa. Governance has failed: promises have been broken, institutions have weakened, public trust has eroded. Citizens, anxious and uncertain, become susceptible to simple explanations. And it is precisely in that moment of complexity that charlatans thrive, because they offer certainty where honest answers require nuance.

A genuine patriot, properly understood, seeks the long-term welfare of the nation. A charlatan patriot seeks to strengthen his own political position. The distinction matters because it shapes what happens next. When citizens lose confidence in the structures meant to protect them, they become hungry for someone to blame. Charlatans build solidarity by identifying enemies—and enemies are far easier to mobilize against than the slow, difficult work of rebuilding institutions, fighting corruption, or creating genuine economic opportunity. It is easier to march against Nigerians than to demand accountability from a government that has failed to deliver jobs. It is easier to close a Zimbabwean's shop than to confront why your own nation's economy is contracting.

There is something legitimate in the public mood that deserves acknowledgment. States do have the right to regulate immigration and enforce their laws. Undocumented migration does place pressure on already strained public services. Retail competition creates real friction. But these are not the origin of unemployment, corruption, or institutional decay. They are simply more visible than those failures, and therefore easier to blame. Neither Nigerians in Ghana nor Zimbabweans in South Africa created the governance failures of their host countries. Yet for the charlatan patriot, it is far simpler to mobilize a crowd against foreigners than to undertake the harder, slower project of building a shared national identity rooted in justice and opportunity.

Genuine patriots are often not immediately visible. They refuse simplistic narratives. They resist ethnic mobilization. They reject scapegoating. They speak uncomfortable truths about structural causes. These qualities do not build movements quickly. In moments of anxiety, crowds prefer certainty to complexity, applause to criticism. The charlatan gains followers; the true patriot earns irrelevance, or worse. And so across Africa, the voices asking harder structural questions are drowned out by those offering a single, satisfying enemy.

Citizens become genuinely patriotic when the state provides justice, security, opportunity, fairness, and dignity. Without these, patriotic rhetoric becomes merely performance—a bond that can be redirected toward whichever target is convenient in any given season. The question that matters now, for all of Africa, is this: when politicians tell us who to blame, are they helping us solve our problems, or helping us avoid the harder questions about why those problems exist? The answer will determine whether the continent moves toward genuine nationhood or continues to harvest anger in the name of patriotism.