By Mavuso Msimang<\/p>\n\n\n\n
South Africa cannot deport its way out of Southern Africa\u2019s economic crisis. Mavuso Msimang <\/em>argues that the country should instead lead an ambitious regional development programme capable of creating jobs, strengthening infrastructure and transforming migration across the SADC region.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Last year, the South African government spent an estimated R500 million deporting 109,344 undocumented African migrants. Do the arithmetic, as one occasionally must in this line of work, and the figure comes to roughly R4,570 for every person removed: the diesel for the buses, the wages of the officials, the paperwork that will be filed and, in time, forgotten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is an impressive machine, in its way. Planes were chartered. Police were deployed. Detention centres, those grim way-stations of our national conscience, were filled and emptied and filled again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exercise made headlines, as such exercises reliably do. It made no discernible difference whatsoever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because this month, more people crossed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not for the thrill of it, one hastens to add, and certainly not because the Limpopo River offers a superior aesthetic experience to the N1. They crossed because there is no power to run a welding machine in Bulawayo, no irrigation to plant maize in rural Malawi and no factory work to be found in Beira.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are, in short, attempting to police our way out of a development problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is expensive. It is inhumane. And it does not work, has not worked and will not work, however many billions we throw at the border in the vain hope that a fence might succeed where a fair economy has failed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is worth pausing on that R500 million a moment longer, if only because our public discourse rarely does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is roughly the annual budget of several rural district hospitals, or the cost of refurbishing hundreds of kilometres of provincial roads that our motorists curse daily and our engineers repair rarely, if at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spent on deportations, that money vanishes into an administrative churn that produces no asset, teaches no skill and answers no question except the one nobody was seriously asking: whether the state can move people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course it can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The apartheid state was, if nothing else, extraordinarily competent at moving people against their will. That we have inherited elements of that machinery and redirected its target ought to trouble our public representatives far more than it evidently does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is, however, another way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It begins with accepting one uncomfortable truth, the kind more palatable in a seminar room than at a ballot box: no country in the Southern African Development Community can prosper alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are bound to our neighbours by geography, by history and by the plain economic logic that a customer without a job cannot buy what we are selling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since at least the discovery of gold, Southern Africa has functioned as a single labour market. Tens of thousands of workers from Lesotho, Mozambique, Malawi and elsewhere laboured in South African mines, often confined to compounds and effectively removed from the consciousness of wider society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To expect a century and a half of regional labour movement to be stopped by a border fence is absurd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The myth that migrants simply \u2018steal jobs\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The loudest narrative in our politics, repeated with the confidence of received wisdom and about as much scrutiny, holds that migrants \u201csteal jobs\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is a tidy story. It is also, on the evidence, far more complicated than its political proponents suggest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Research cited in this debate has found that migrant entrepreneurs can create employment as well as compete for it. Across spaza shops, panel-beating workshops, construction crews and other small businesses, migrants frequently employ South Africans alongside fellow foreign nationals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These migrants are also taxpayers and consumers, a fact our politics prefers not to dwell upon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They rent houses, buy data and pay VAT on every loaf of bread and every litre of fuel. When we raid and deport, we do not simply remove a worker from the informal economy. We can also remove a customer, an employer and a contributor to local economic activity in the same stroke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Driving people underground through fear does not create jobs. It creates a shadow economy in which fewer people pay tax, fewer workers are protected and wages can be driven down for everyone, citizen and foreigner alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The genuine pressures on South African employment are much larger: weak economic growth, unreliable infrastructure, energy insecurity and a region that has, for decades, failed to develop as a region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A SADC Marshall Plan<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If we wish to see fewer people arriving at our borders out of economic desperation, we must create more opportunity on the other side of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That requires thinking like a region of 16 countries, rather than 16 separate fiefdoms guarding their own patch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What follows is not a utopian sketch, but a proposal built around three catalytic projects that could, over a ten-year horizon, transform SADC\u2019s economic geography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first concerns power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Democratic Republic of Congo\u2019s Inga hydropower scheme on the Congo River holds immense generating potential. A regional approach could see SADC secure long-term access to the project, compensate the DRC through guaranteed revenues and expand electricity trading through a strengthened regional power pool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This should be complemented by Mozambique\u2019s substantial gas reserves, including their use for fertiliser production and baseload electricity generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second concerns food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Zambia is water-rich, land-abundant and centrally located, possessing many of the natural advantages needed to become one of the region\u2019s principal agricultural hubs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SADC should establish a regional agricultural research centre in Zambia with a mandate to develop drought-resistant seeds, maintain a regional seed bank, support fertiliser production using Mozambican gas, train smallholder farmers and operate a regional food-security early-warning system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The third concerns trade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Landlocked countries cannot industrialise at scale without reliable access to the sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SADC therefore requires major investment in ports, railways and roads linking Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Botswana, the DRC and other inland economies to the coast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maputo, Beira, Nacala, Walvis Bay and Dar es Salaam should form part of a broader regional logistics network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Special Economic Zones could then follow a simple regional principle: grow in one country, process in another and export through a third.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The total catalytic investment required would run into tens of billions of dollars over a decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That sounds like a great deal of money, and it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the cost of inaction is higher still: lost GDP, chronic instability, mass unemployment and the billions already spent year after year trying to secure borders that will never truly be secure while neighbouring economies remain weak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is cheaper, in other words, to build the region than to fence it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And this cannot be a project belonging only to the DRC, Zambia and Mozambique, however central their geography makes them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Zimbabwe\u2019s engineers and steel could help build power infrastructure. Botswana\u2019s water specialists could contribute to regional irrigation projects. Namibia\u2019s Walvis Bay and Tanzania\u2019s Dar es Salaam would form part of the port network. Malawi\u2019s farmers could benefit from drought-resistant seed research. Lesotho and Eswatini would gain from the manufacturing opportunities created by cheaper power and improved transport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every SADC state must have a role, a vote and a benefit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not charity. It is partnership, in the fullest and least sentimental sense of the word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The front door, not the bush<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n With jobs, electricity and greater economic opportunity available across the region, migration can become an orderly process rather than a nightly gamble with rivers, fences and smugglers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SADC should implement a biometric regional work-permit system structured around sector-based quotas, so that movement across borders becomes a matter of administration rather than peril.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider the builder from Lesotho who applies in Maseru, is cleared quickly, works nine months in Gauteng, pays tax and UIF, and returns home when the contract ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider the farm worker from Zimbabwe who legally enters for citrus season, harvests the crop and leaves with dignity intact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not fantasy. It is administration, the dullest and most necessary of the state\u2019s arts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, then, is the policy choice reduced to a single sentence: we can spend billions chasing people through the bush, or we can spend billions building a region and invite workers through the front door with permits in hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why South Africa must lead<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Regional integration fails whenever a single country attempts to benefit alone. The alternative offers three clear advantages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, industrialisation would spread across the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cheap power and efficient transport mean factories could be located in Bulawayo, Gaborone, Lusaka or Dar es Salaam rather than having the region\u2019s industrial ambitions concentrated disproportionately in Gauteng.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, resilience would become shared rather than solitary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A regional power and food system means that when Malawi suffers a drought, neighbouring countries can assist. When South Africa suffers an electricity shortage, regional generating capacity can help. No single country need face its worst year alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third, South Africa\u2019s proper role is that of an anchor, not a benefactor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the region\u2019s largest and most sophisticated economy, South Africa should help anchor such a project. Our banks, logistics networks, capital markets and skills base could help unlock investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In return, South Africa gains a larger regional market, stronger neighbouring economies and, ultimately, more stable borders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is leadership properly understood, not dominance dressed in the language of solidarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of this absolves Southern African governments of their obligations to their own citizens, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A programme of this ambition will survive contact with reality only if it is administered with a rigour our public institutions have not always shown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every dollar spent must be tracked, audited and accounted for. Officials who treat regional development finance as a private tollgate should face the same consequences as those who loot municipal coffers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The citizens of Lusaka and Lilongwe deserve the same accountability that the citizens of Johannesburg and Cape Town demand from their governments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Marshall Plan built on graft is not a Marshall Plan. It is corruption on a grander scale, dressed in the language of solidarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fairness, after all, cuts in every direction, or it is not fairness at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A prosperous SADC of hundreds of millions of people could trade with the world with far greater collective power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The European Union offers an instructive precedent. After the devastation of the Second World War, countries that had repeatedly fought one another began integrating their economies, first through coal and steel and eventually through a far broader common market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, citizens routinely work and live across borders in ways that would once have seemed politically impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That, too, is a measure of success: when yesterday\u2019s impossibility becomes tomorrow\u2019s Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Southern Africa can pursue its own version of that ambition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The border will truly become secure on the day a young man in Harare has electricity in his home, a job to go to in the morning and food on his table at night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not before. It is time, at last, to choose development over deportation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We rise together or, as history has shown often enough to those who did not wish to learn the lesson, we fall together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The SADC Summit of Heads of State and Government is due to meet in Durban on 16\u201317 August 2026.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n