Business Day
24 July 2026
In a news crossing, shortly prior to the 30 June ‘deadline’ given to foreign migrants, a young African man outside the Malawian consular office in Woodmead, told the news reporter that he had driven up a few hours earlier. From Patensie. Patensie? If you have never heard of the place, I do not blame you. A small town in the Sarah Baartman District in the Eastern Cape, Patensie is known more for its citrus exports, than any insurrectionary impulses.
Between April and October of every year, the citrus season brings together a series of interlinked economic activities (and with it many seasonal workers). The nearby valleys have been the site of periodic ‘flare’ ups of tension between local and foreign workers over the last decade. Calling this ‘xenophobic’ obscures the ‘economic’ features of this as a particular form of inter-group economic competition. With resulting expectations placed at the door of employers and the state.
Protests in nearby Kirkwood in 2022; saw worker groups and community organizations accusing networks of commercial farmers of stoking divisions by paying foreign workers to pick and pack citrus at wages below the then prevailing national minimum wage of over R23 an hour. Four years earlier, in 2018, local worker groups (supported by civics under SANCO) had gone on strike for the national minimum wage. Alongside every one of these disturbances were horrific stories of deductions for lodging and transport eroding the already meagre wages of the foreign workers from Malawi, Zimbabwe and Lesotho primarily. As we near the end of July, and nearly a month since the March and March ‘deadline’, the impact of the ‘exodus’ is being felt in agriculture beyond citrus.
A media report a few days ago lamented an ‘unexpected labour shortage’ in the sugar cane sector. In the middle of the harvesting season. Canegrowers servicing the Tongaat’s Maidstone mill were battling, ‘to find enough people to harvest cane’, the report read quoting Pratish Sharma, a sugar cane farmer. This episode reveals, often-overlooked features of these ‘waves’ of anti-immigrant sentiment.
The first, being the contradictions of ‘free trade’ as a ‘universal idea’. Or put differently, the contradiction between the free mobility of capital, technology, information and goods implied in it; without the mobility of labour. While the ‘spine’ of South African economic diplomacy rests on growing the share of intra-African trade; many nations (South Africa included) restrict labour market participation by foreigners. Egypt mandates the employment of nine local citizens for every foreign national, Nigeria exercises an expatriate quota, Mozambique enforces a strict foreign labour quota, and Gabon limits the hiring of non-specialist operational staff to 2%.
Secondly, what may erroneously be referred to as ‘xenophobia’ is actually a pernicious form of inter-group economic competition arising from the ‘revealed preference’ of employers in places like Patensie and Kirkwood, for precarious and inadequately documented workers. Such contests are not unique to South Africa, with conflicts between low wage workers for scarce, unskilled jobs being one of the ‘five’ arena of intergroup economic competition identified by Indian economist, Pranab Bardhan. Drawing on experiences from a diverse set of places, from Trinidad to Ivory Coast to Western Europe, Bardhan observes these conflicts, as processes involving claims for ‘preference’ in or mandated ‘reservation’ of economic opportunities. This agitation for ‘reservation’ (which is broadly accepted in the South African White Paper on Labour Migration), coincides with the deepening casualization of ‘day-work’ or piece-jobs as a defining feature of work in agriculture; rather than say labour tenancy or other similar agrarian arrangements. These examples indicate that migration is a global ‘collective action problem’, worthy of resolution by advancing beyond the the narrow limits of the periodic eruption of crisis.
The gentleman in the news crossing, is one of the over 42 000 Malawians that had been processed for deportation and repatriation by 11 July. One of the dramatis personae in a story that extends from the kitchens of our homes to little known places like Patensie. One of the many lives sandwiched between the pursuit of profit from precarity and frustrations over the elusive promise of change.
Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administration He writes in his personal capacity.