Essay On Xenophobia

Xenophobia refers to the inexplicable anger and hatred for strangers or foreigners. Xenophobia is one of the issues that persist in the South African state. One of the most regularly mentioned reasons for the occurrences of xenophobia in South Africa is Apartheid. The intolerant attitudes learned during Apartheid still dwell among some of the citizens. Another explanation of the violence is blamed on the ANC government’s service delivery bad record, what Apartheid didn’t damage, the ANC did. South African xenophobia has also been explained by the level of social and economic inequality in the country. It has been noted that the greatest punishments of xenophobic violence have been carried out in borders of formal society, where foreign nationals compete with the poorest South Africans to make themselves a basic living. And then

On the face of it, these concerns about livelihoods seem homogeneous to cases of xenophobia everywhere else in the world where people seek scapegoats for their deprivation. A popular group of leftist intellectuals in South Africa has argued that xenophobic violence is ultimately the consequence of economic decay and uneven development as a result of structural adjustment and deindustrialization (Bond et al. 2011; optically discern withal Tshitereke 1999;Harris 2002) They point out that the ANC government’s policies have sent unemployment rocketing from 13 percent in 1994 to 25 percent in 2013, or 40 percent by unofficial measures. According to the Economist, “half of South Africans under 24 probing for work retain none. Of those who have jobs, a third earn less than $2 a day.”5 Since 1994, the number of people living on less than one dollar a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million. Two million people have lost their homes because of coerced abstractions and inflated rents, and the number of shack dwellers has incremented by fifty percent, to the point where today more than one quarter of South Africans live in shacks (Klein