Ghana this week followed Nigeria by flying migrants/illegal migrants out of South Africa due to being concerned for their safety. I do think this is going to continue and is a natural reaction to the harsh reality of life in a depressed job seeking economy. Xenophobia has been around for many years and it seems to happen or rises a few times every year.
With little of no hope of finding work for the foreseeable future foreigners that are working will be singled out blamed for the locals financial misery. The open borders have allowed millions to cross over into South Africa hoping to find employment which in a nutshell is unregulated chaos.
The lack of policing on the streets does not help with unemployment so high crime will be rampant. Unofficial stats have unemployment between 50% and 70% along with inflation creeping up monthly the unemployed are desperate. The problem is these figures do not include the undocumented migrants from other African countries so the 50-70% figure could be correct of a much larger total and not the total population within the SA borders the statistics are using. I would say that is a given and we are talking many more millions with the official count of Zimbabweans being around 780K of which 180K have permits and unofficial somewhere between 3 and 10 million all of working age.
When the employment market is flooded with foreigners one can understand the locals grievances because their lives became that much harder to compete. The unskilled work they would have been expecting to find is no longer available. We have 1 documented Zimbabwean working for us and he has been with us for years and out of principle these days only hire locals. I do think we would have staff complaining if we hired a foreigner because there is a real fear for jobs in the future.
A news story that hit the head lines this afternoon is not going to help how the locals feel about foreigners with a police raid resulting in the arrest of 5 foreigners . 3 Zimbabweans and 2 Malawians were caught red handed with stolen traffic lights.
The police raided premises in Johannesburg uncovering a stock pile of stolen traffic lights that had been cut down and removed for selling as scrap metal. The cables are stripped for their copper and the steel poles sold to dodgy scrap merchants. News stories like this add fuel to the fire when it comes to foreigners committing crimes and especially those stealing the infrastructure are a high percentage being foreigners. If there are no jobs then the low hanging fruit will be stolen first and this all started to happen within the last 20 or so years. The locals blame the foreigners for all these crimes and they should know who is doing it so it is hard to argue against how they truly feel.
I mentioned previously in a recent post roughly 500 traffic light intersections in Johannesburg are not working or "missing" and now you can see with your own eyes understanding the entire system is stolen. The City of Johannesburg is not repairing faulty traffic lights, but rather replacing the entire system. Some intersections are so bad that stop signs now replace the traffic lights as one intersection had 13 new replacement sets last year.
Visibility on the roads are not great due to no street lighting left working which makes driving even more treacherous knowing the state of the roads.
I learned something new today why the street lights that line the roads and streets are being targeted. Last year nearly 40 000 street lights were vandalized and it made little sense till now. The actual figures state 92 000 of the 270 000 street lights do not work. The street lights have an independent timer which allows the lights to switch off during the day and turn on in the evening. These timers are being used to help enable illegal electricity connections and is not just about stripping the copper wire cables.
