Business braces for fallout from anti-immigration protests

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JEREMY MAGGS: South African business is watching today’s anti-immigration mobilisation, I think, with growing concern not only because of possible disruption, but because of the wider signal it sends about stability, rule of law and investor confidence.

With some businesses weighing whether to trade or not, and others worried about staff safety, supply chains and reputational damage.

I want to put all of that on the table. I’m in conversation now with Alan Mukoki from the South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Sacci). Alan, what’s your immediate reading of the risk to business today and also moving forward in the week?

ALAN MUKOKI: Well, of course there will be risk, Jeremy, because it’s going to be a very low trading day. You’re not going to sell as much and generate revenue that you were going to, but you are going to carry the cost of the day.

Because whether you have to pay for your fixed costs or some of the variable costs relating to things like salaries, you’ll have to pay because it depends on the company that you’re running at a particular point in time.

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But the disruption obviously is an area of significant concern because of not knowing the uncertainty and the ambiguity and the complexity thereof creates that level of heightened anxiety, without any doubt, because you don’t know, is it going to be today? Is it going to continue to tomorrow?

And everyone is at that heightened level of of suspense.

JEREMY MAGGS: Which sectors do you think are most exposed if protests escalate not only during the course of the day, but possibly into the week and moving beyond that?

ALAN MUKOKI: Mostly client-facing type retail environments tend to be much more affected. Then depending on whether – and hopefully this is not what’s going to happen – because we also got reports that some of the very aggrieved South African truck drivers may want to blockade some of the main arterial roads.

That in itself, then, will take us to the kind of events that you generally see in Paris when the farmers go out, as they did a few months ago, throwing manure all over the streets of Paris and even blockading some of the ports. We hope that it doesn’t get to that French-type of activity,

But if you don’t have the blockades on the roads, then I think that most of the manufacturing people will be protected in industry because then the transportation nodes will not actually be affected.

But if it’s not, if it’s just people marching on the streets, then definitely, we advise most people who are running retail to close their shops today because you don’t want to take that risk.

JEREMY MAGGS: Are you satisfied as a chamber that government and the South African Police Service (SAPS) have reacted effectively to this?

ALAN MUKOKI: We don’t know. We cannot say we are satisfied when we have not seen them in action. We only know what they did or did not do in 2021 where they were a disaster and a miserable failure.

They did nothing of significance to stop any of the violence and the damage to property and the injuring and maiming of people. So today we don’t know. They have promised that they will do something about it, so we don’t know what they are going to do.

It depends, you can only judge a situation on game day.

When the Springboks are running on the turf and the New Zealanders are coming at them, that’s when you know whether you’re adequately prepared or not. Before the match starts, you don’t actually really know.

So they have made the promises. They’ve said that they are going to make sure that they will stop any level of criminality whilst they protect the marches.

The march [organisers] want to march peacefully, so hopefully the marchers themselves will march peacefully and hopefully the criminal element – and we can’t always blame all the marchers who are marching peacefully, that they don’t have a legitimate grievance and that they shouldn’t be exercising their constitutionally enshrined rights to free assembly and protest peacefully.

But it’s the security forces that we are very worried about, in terms of their own capability and their own capacity to be able to do things when things go south.

JEREMY MAGGS: There is, of course, a longer consequence here in terms of South Africa’s trade relationships with the rest of Africa and also xenophobic mobilisation and the message it sends to foreign investors.

ALAN MUKOKI: Well, there is that and I think that it’s always going to be, as we say, things get lost in [translation] because South Africa has tried and they need to do better in communicating and articulating the official government position when it comes to these things.

No country, of course, will allow undocumented illegal migrants to come in, you don’t know what’s going on with your borders.

Because that also will end up affecting South Africa getting back onto exactly the same blacklist because we don’t even know what’s happening with money flows.

Because people, when you have a situation of porous borders and a very unregulated environment and a lot of corruption at the border, you then start also allowing the minority of people who are very bad criminals who come into your country to cause a significant problem.

But South Africa needs to be able to communicate this very clearly.

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This is not an anti-foreigner country, at least not officially, and that the issue that is on the table, as President Ramaphosa tried to explain it the other day in terms of illegal immigration, should be separated, separate the issue of anti-foreigner sentiment to the issue of anti-illegal immigration sentiment and communicate very clearly.

Talk to people, make sure that they understand because luckily for South Africa, South Africa is not the only country. The president of Rwanda (Paul Kagame) has said something similar. I see that Somaliland took the decision as well last week to give undocumented, illegal people 10 days to leave the country.

So these things happen. In the UK, that guy Tommy [Robinson] has been leading marches all over the streets of London. Germany has been having similar problems.

Read/listen:
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So South Africa just needs to be able to communicate very clearly, what is the position of government. We are against the maiming of people, we are against the attacking of people, the destruction of property and buildings just because they belong to people who are undocumented.

The people who are undocumented have a right to be protected until you process their paperwork so that they do the right thing.

JEREMY MAGGS: Do you think we are risking the perception that South Africa cannot protect people or property, and that has a direct business consequence?

ALAN MUKOKI: Well, we have to prove to ourselves that we can because we didn’t do so in 2021. Since that particular period, it’s not like the government has not known about this particular problem.

This thing has been brewing. You’ve got intelligence services that ought to be judging what is the pulse and tone of society? What is happening? What are the issues that are making people rumble?

Organisations such as the NGOs (non-government organisations) that are behind this March and March, they didn’t just wake up this year.

They are not starting this year. They’ve been around over the previous years. They’ve been in parliament, they’ve been raising these issues. But it seems like we have not necessarily been very prepared to understand what needs to happen.

The government has actually not succeeded, and it’s been a failure so far as this is concerned. So we have to make sure that we hold government accountable because finally, this is a law and order issue.

It has nothing to do with anything else. If the laws of the country were actually being maintained, whether it’s to make sure that there is no criminality, whether it’s to make sure that the borders are not porous.

By the way, we are also affected as business because when those borders are actually porous, what tends to happen is that illegal goods also start to come into the country and that affects our own businesses.

Substandard goods also start to come into the country. We don’t even know where these goods are coming from. People are not paying tax. If you’re not paying taxes and you’re competing with me, you’re always going to do better than I am.

Our businesses are being lost because of that type of thing as well. It’s not just coming out of Africa. We’ve seen some of the goods coming out of Asia. Suddenly they are hitting the stores in South Africa. They are not paying any duties. They are not paying any taxes, and they are outcompeting some of our people.

JEREMY MAGGS: And just finally, you would be worried, no doubt, of longer-term consequences if this becomes a recurring economic risk.

ALAN MUKOKI: There is a likelihood that it may be. I think that’s why we say all civil society groups, government, business, we need to get together to really address the root cause of these things.

We’ve seen these kinds of movements in terms of how they start. Some of them will say, well, we’re a single-issue organisation.

But you know what happens with success, so you put together a massive, big, huge mass action like this one. You succeed on one issue. Then you start attacking a whole range of other different issues because the government is actually failing.

So it’s not just this one issue of illegal immigration. The next thing you’re going to hear is going to be the issue relating to health. The next thing you’re going to hear is going to be an issue relating to schooling, to whatever the case might be.

So you might just be getting yourself into a cycle over the next year or two years or three years of organisations that have now found their voice because the political parties are getting weaker in South Africa.

The mass big political parties are getting weaker, and there’s a lot of diversity now in the political parties that they are not actually speaking necessarily with one voice.

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Yes, you’ve got the GNU (government of national unity) but you still have people who are essentially political opponents coming together to maintain some kind of a government. But politically, in terms of who are the people whose voices are much bigger in society, it’s going to be these new organisations now.

When they find their voice, they are going to start to think, well, wait a minute, we can now galvanise on a whole range of other different issues.

JEREMY MAGGS: I’m going to leave it there. Alan Mukoki, thank you very much indeed, from the South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry.