JOHN AKINRIBIDO urges South Africa to confront honestly the structural causes of xenophobia
Africa welcomes approximately 67 million international tourists annually, generating more than $38 billion in revenue. Yet intra-African tourism — Africans traveling within Africa — remains underdeveloped, constrained by visa restrictions, inadequate air connectivity, and, increasingly, fear. Images of burning foreign-owned shops in Johannesburg or Durban, South Africa, do not remain confined to national borders. They reverberate across the continent and the diaspora at the speed of a WhatsApp forward.
The irony is profound. South Africa, the nation that gave the world Nelson Mandela, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the living philosophy of Ubuntu — I am because we are — periodically erupts in horrifying attacks against fellow Africans: Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Nigerians, Ethiopians, Malawians. Neighbors in geography, kin in history, yet treated as adversaries. The torch of African liberation burns at one end, while a mob extinguishes livelihoods at the other.
This contradiction is not merely a domestic disgrace. It is an economic catastrophe with a specific and measurable casualty: African tourism, and through it, the continent’s most credible path toward integration and shared prosperity.
