By Gabriel Manyati
The winter air in Johannesburg carries a familiar, bitter chill, but the heat rising from the tarmac in the inner city has nothing to do with the weather. On a bustling morning, a crowd of ordinary South Africans marches in tight formation past the shuttered storefronts of Hillbrow. They are holding hand-painted cardboard placards, their bold letters demanding the immediate enforcement of the country’s immigration laws.
The singing is rhythmic, a haunting collective groan of frustration that bounces off the concrete high-rises. To the casual observer, this is a familiar scene of modern South African discontent, a localised eruption of anger directed at the undocumented population living in the shadows of the country’s failing urban spaces.
But this election is not really about foreigners. It is about whether South Africans still believe their own government governs.
In this, the second instalment of The Sunday Political Read, we must confront a profound tectonic shift occurring within the body politic as the country marches toward the 4 November 2026 local government elections. For three decades, municipal polls were defined by the predictable, unglamorous lexicon of local service delivery. They were about the potholes scarring suburban roads, the erratic flow of clean water, uncollected refuse rotting on township corners, and the dark stretches of unlit streets.
Not anymore. The upcoming municipal elections are rapidly morphing into something entirely unprecedented in South Africa’s democratic history: a high-stakes referendum on state sovereignty, national identity, and the rule of law.
To understand why immigration has moved from a complex policy debate in Pretoria to a burning ballot-box issue in every ward across the country requires stripping away the simplistic rhetoric of both the political class and social commentators.
For a significant portion of the electorate, illegal immigration has become the ultimate, highly visible proxy for total state failure.
When a citizen looks at an unmanned border post, a corrupt Home Affairs official selling a fraudulent document for a few thousand rands, or a local police station completely unable to regulate illicit trade in informal settlements, they do not just see a breakdown in migration management. They see a state that has abdicated its primary constitutional duty: the maintenance of order and sovereignty.
The presence of millions of undocumented migrants, according to varying estimates by research institutions, has become the most tangible, day-to-day evidence of a government that has lost control of its own house.
The reality of South Africa’s socio-economic crisis provides a fertile backdrop for this sentiment. With a national unemployment rate hovering stubbornly around 32 percent, and youth unemployment exceeding 60 percent, competition for scarce resources is brutal. In the struggling municipalities, where infrastructure is buckling under the weight of decades of corruption and mismanagement, public clinics are overcrowded, schools are bursting at the seams, and informal settlements are expanding exponentially without basic sanitation.
In this pressure cooker, the distinction between national and local mandates dissolves. Constitutionally, migration policy and border control are strictly the domain of the national government. Yet, the physical consequences of a broken national policy land squarely on the doorsteps of local councillors. It is the municipal budget that must stretch to provide services to unmapped populations; it is the local community policing forum that must deal with the security vacuums created by ineffective national policing strategies.
The country’s current political landscape reflects this structural crisis perfectly, and the major parties are positioning themselves accordingly for 4 November.
The African National Congress (ANC) finds itself in an incredibly vulnerable position. Having presided over the gradual decay of border security and institutional capacity at Home Affairs, the liberation party can no longer rely on vague pan-Africanist ideals to quieten an angry electorate. Its campaign messaging is caught in a difficult bind, trying to promise stricter enforcement through recent legislative overhauls while simultaneously attempting to distance itself from the very systemic failures it created.
Conversely, the Democratic Alliance (DA) is tailoring its message around the theme of strict constitutionalism and administrative competence. The DA’s strategy is to frame illegal immigration not through an ideological lens, but as a crisis of law enforcement and resource allocation, arguing that well-governed municipalities cannot fix local economies if national state capacity is non-existent.
The real wildcards in this election, however, are the populist and nationalist formations that have weaponised the immigration issue with devastating political efficacy. ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance (PA) have long recognised that border control resonates deeply with working-class voters who feel abandoned by the mainstream political establishment. Their messaging is direct, unapologetic, and laser-focused on the rule of law, which could yield massive electoral dividends in highly contested metropolitan areas like Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni, and Tshwane.
Meanwhile, the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) present contrasting populist approaches. The MK Party taps into a traditionalist, nativist sentiment that demands absolute state authority, while the EFF tries to maintain an increasingly unpopular open-borders rhetoric, a stance that leaves it highly exposed to an electorate that is rapidly losing patience with abstract ideological solidarity.
This political transformation is not unique to South Africa. Across the globe, from the United Kingdom and the United States to France, Italy, and the Netherlands, immigration has consistently acted as the great disruptor of modern politics. In those northern democracies, the failure of centrist governments to manage migration led directly to the rise of populist movements that fundamentally reshaped their legislative architectures.
Yet, South Africa’s situation is uniquely tragic. Unlike Western Europe or North America, the country’s crisis is not merely about demographic shifts or cultural anxieties. It is rooted in a post-1994 historical arc where the promise of a capable, prosperous democratic state has collided with the harsh realities of economic stagnation and institutional plunder.
When regional crises in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of Congo sent waves of desperate migrants southward after 1994, a capable South African state could have managed the influx through a transparent, efficient, and lawful system. Instead, the state capacity dissolved just as the demand for it reached its historic peak.
The immense danger facing South Africa in the lead-up to November is the inevitable rise of toxic, opportunistic populism. It is remarkably easy for a politician to point at a foreign national running a tuckshop and blame them for a municipality’s failure to build roads or provide electricity.
Scapegoating is a cheap substitute for policy. Yet vigilantism and xenophobic violence do absolutely nothing to repair a broken border fence or root out a corrupt syndicate operating inside the Department of Home Affairs.
Denying that the public has legitimate concerns about lawlessness is equally dangerous. For years, the political elite dismissed public anger over illegal immigration as mere prejudice, a refusal to engage that created a massive political vacuum now filled by volatile, populist forces.
What South African voters are truly demanding through this focus on immigration is not a politics of hatred, but a politics of capacity. Beneath the angry rhetoric lies a profound yearning for a capable state, secure borders, an effective police service, and accountable local leadership. The protest marches are not a rejection of democracy; they are a desperate, disordered plea for the restoration of the state itself.
On 4 November, South Africans may think they are voting for councillors. In reality, they will be casting a verdict on whether the democratic state still commands the confidence of the people it was created to serve.
