Prof. Abdi Ismail Samatar Challenges Political Narratives on Xenophobia: “Africa Must Look in the Mirror”

By Olu Ibekwe

The recent call by Ghanaian parliamentarian and Majority Chief Whip, Hon. Rockson-Nelson Etse Kwami Dafeamekpor, for the African Union to establish an early warning system against xenophobic violence has reignited debate on one of Africa's most sensitive and enduring challenges: the treatment of migrants within the continent.

While many African leaders and policymakers have welcomed stronger continental mechanisms to prevent violence against foreign nationals, renowned African scholar and Pan-Africanist, Prof. Abdi Ismail Samatar, has offered a sharply different perspective, arguing that the discussion must move beyond rhetoric and confront the deeper structural failures driving migration and social tensions across Africa.

Responding to the growing commentary surrounding xenophobic violence in South Africa, Prof. Samatar criticized what he described as "unreflective rhetoric" and politically convenient narratives that focus solely on condemning South Africa without addressing the broader failures of governance across the continent.

"One of the tragedies of our continent is often the unreflective rhetoric and politically opportunistic statements about our challenges and failures and to look into the mirror," Samatar observed.

According to him, many African political leaders have failed to undertake a serious examination of why millions of Africans continue to leave their home countries in search of economic opportunities elsewhere on the continent and beyond.

The Real Question: Why Are Africans Leaving Home?

For Prof. Samatar, the starting point of any serious conversation about migration and xenophobic tensions should be a simple but uncomfortable question: Why have so many Africans been forced to leave their countries in the first place?

"The simple answer is the total failure of regimes in nearly every country to create opportunities in each country," he argues.

This perspective shifts the focus from the symptoms of migration-related tensions to their root causes. Across much of the continent, persistent unemployment, weak economic growth, corruption, political instability, and poor governance have left millions of young Africans with limited prospects at home. As a result, migration has become not merely a choice but often an economic necessity.

In Samatar's view, blaming only receiving countries while ignoring the failures of sending countries amounts to a selective reading of reality.

South Africa's Crisis of Inequality

At the same time, the Somali-born scholar does not absolve South Africa of responsibility.

He argues that successive South African governments have struggled to generate sufficient economic growth and have failed to reduce one of the highest levels of inequality in the world. The result has been a growing sense of frustration among poor South Africans who compete with equally poor migrants for jobs, housing, informal trading opportunities, and access to public services.

"Regimes in South Africa since 2009 failed to grow the economy and reduce the catastrophic inequality," Samatar notes.

According to this analysis, xenophobic violence cannot be understood merely as an expression of hatred toward foreigners. Rather, it emerges from an environment of economic exclusion, social despair, and competition over scarce resources.

Such conditions, he argues, have increasingly pitted poor South Africans against poor immigrants who themselves are fleeing economic hardship and governance failures elsewhere in Africa.

"This is the crux of the problem," Samatar insists.

Revisiting the Xenophobia Debate

Samatar's comments are consistent with arguments he advanced in his influential 2019 article, "Is it Xenophobia? I Think Not," published in South Africa's City Press. In that article, he challenged conventional descriptions of the violence as purely xenophobic and argued that the phenomenon required a more nuanced understanding.

He observed that most incidents occurred in impoverished townships and informal settlements where both South African citizens and foreign nationals were victims of the same criminality and socio-economic marginalization. He further argued that poor South Africans themselves suffer high levels of violence and insecurity, raising questions about why continental outrage often becomes most visible only when immigrants are targeted.

While acknowledging the suffering of migrants, Samatar contended that focusing exclusively on xenophobia risks obscuring deeper realities of poverty, unemployment, crime, and state failure that affect both local communities and immigrants alike.

His position has remained controversial. Critics argue that economic grievances do not negate the existence of anti-foreigner prejudice and violence. Numerous studies have documented xenophobic attitudes and attacks directed specifically at foreign nationals in South Africa.

Yet Samatar maintains that simplistic explanations do little to solve the problem.

A Challenge to Africa's Political Class

Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Samatar's intervention is his criticism of Africa's political leadership.

He argues that many politicians readily condemn xenophobic violence while failing to address the governance failures that drive migration in the first place. In his view, genuine Pan-Africanism requires more than speeches about unity; it requires building economies that offer citizens meaningful opportunities at home.

He rejects the notion that poor South Africans are inherently less committed to African solidarity than political elites elsewhere on the continent.

"The poor in South Africa are no less Pan-Africanistic than the Ghanaian politicians," he argues.

Instead, he calls for a more honest and comprehensive conversation about economic development, state capacity, and social justice across Africa.

Invoking the late Ghanaian novelist and critic, Ayi Kwei Armah, Samatar lamented what he sees as the shortcomings of Africa's governing elite, recalling Armah's famous criticism that many members of the continent's political class "were senile before they were born."

Beyond Condemnation

The exchange between Prof. Abdi Ismail Samatar and Hon. Rockson-Nelson Etse Kwami Dafeamekpor, both serving members of the Pan-African Parliament, underscores two distinct but potentially complementary perspectives on the causes of and solutions to xenophobic violence on the continent.

Dafeamekpor emphasizes the need for stronger continental institutions, legal protections, accountability mechanisms, and an African Union early warning system capable of preventing attacks before they occur.

Samatar, by contrast, argues that such measures, while valuable, will be insufficient unless African governments confront the structural failures that force millions to migrate and create conditions of economic desperation in both sending and receiving countries.

Together, their perspectives point to a broader truth: xenophobic violence is not merely a law-enforcement problem, nor solely a migration problem. It is also a governance, development, and inequality problem.

As Africa pursues deeper continental integration through Agenda 2063 and the African Continental Free Trade Area, the challenge for policymakers will be to reconcile these two imperatives: protecting migrants wherever they reside while simultaneously creating the economic and political conditions that make migration a choice rather than a necessity.

Until then, the debate between institutional solutions and structural reforms is likely to remain at the heart of Africa's struggle to fulfill the promise of Pan-African unity.