After an extensive immigration screening at OR Tambo International Airport, 295 undocumented Ghanaians were repatriated from South Africa, highlighting the challenges of immigration enforcement.
South Africa cannot expand its business footprint across the continent while refusing to reckon with what regional integration demands.
There is a boardroom conversation happening in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Sandton that almost never appears in the immigration debate. A South African bank is finalising its expansion in Kenya. A retailer mapping logistics corridor through Zambia and Mozambique.
A telecoms group is negotiating spectrum rights in four SADC countries simultaneously. Capital is moving north. It iswelcomed. It is celebrated as evidence of South African dynamism and regionalleadership.
Then the conversation shifts to a taxi rank in Johannesburg, or a communitymeeting in Limpopo, or a ward council in the Cape Flats, and the same country that insists on unfettered access to African markets becomes loudly impatient with African people moving toward its own.That contradiction is not a talking point. It is a structural problem.
