Remarks by Former President Kgalema Motlanthe, Patron of the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation
KMF Winter Seminar on the Continent and Migration
23 July 2023
Migration is one of the defining issues of our epoch-setting times. Mobility in Africa and the world is a long-established norm, from the earliest days of human settlement, movement and trade. At the International Labour Conference in June 2014, the then Director-General, Guy Ryder said migration is “a key feature of today’s world of work and one which raises complex policy challenges”. The world is grappling with innovative responses to this complexity, and much work lies ahead in this regard.
The economic development of South Africa is predicated on the importation of slave labour and the migrant labour system on mines and agriculture. This was accelerated after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand reef in 1886.
South Africa’s modern economy was, quite literally, dug out of the ground by migrants. The discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1867 and of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 created almost insatiable demand for labour that the local settler population could not and would not supply. The mining houses met that demand by drawing workers from across the subcontinent: from the Eastern Cape, the Transvaal and Natal, and decisively, from beyond the borders of what would become the Union: Mozambique, Basutoland (Lesotho), Bechuanaland (Botswana), Nyasaland (Malawi) and Swaziland (Eswatini).
To secure and cheapen this supply, the Chamber of Mines (formed 1889) built one of the most elaborate labourrecruitment systems in the world. The Native Labour Department (1893) gave way to the Rand Native Labour Association, and then in 1900 to the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA, “Wenela”), which recruited heavily in Mozambique, with the Native Recruiting Corporation (NRC, 1912) recruiting within South Africa and the High Commission Territories. Together these bodies operated as a labour monopsony, designed in the Chamber’s own words to hold wages down and to eliminate competition between mines for workers.
The system rested on two pillars that shaped South African demography and law for a century. The first was oscillating migrancy: workers were brought in on fixed contracts, housed in single-sex closed compounds (pioneered at Kimberley, refined on the Rand) and hostels, and then returned to rural “sending” areas, so that the worker was, in the words of one commission, “divided in half as a human being”: a labour unit on the mine and family man in the reserve. By law the gold mines were, until 1969, not permitted to provide family housing for more than three percent (3%) of their black workforce, and none at all to “foreign natives”. The second pillar was the integration of neighbouring economies: capitation fees paid by WNLA became a major revenue source for neighbouring colonial administrations, and mine wages remitted home underwrote the fiscus of the surrounding territories, binding the entire Southern African region into a single labour economy centred on the Witwatersrand.
Two consequences matter for the present framework. First, the migrant-labour system created a deep, structural interdependence between South Africa and its neighbours that long predates SADC and that helps explain why the modern Act singles out the facilitation of regional movement and academic exchange, and why special dispensations for Lesotho and Zimbabwe have the character of managing an old relationship rather than creating a new one. Second, the system was the seedbed of the controls, pass laws, influx control, compound discipline, that the Aliens Control Act 96 of 1991 inherited and that the post-1994 Refugees and Immigration Acts were meant to dismantle. The contemporary
Trustees: Mrs. G Motlanthe (Executive) | Mr. J Lekoma | Ms. C Maponya | Mr. M Mariano (Trustee & Board Secretary) | Prof. F Cachalia (Chairperson) | Mr. KP Motlanthe (Patron) Ms. Mandisa Matthews (Advisory & Special Projects)
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anxiety about “foreign” migrants from the region is therefore historically ironic: those migrants, or their forebears, built the economy that now debates their admission.
Trade and the role of South African capital. The clearest expression of free South Africa’s continental role lies in trade and investment. Roughly a quarter of South Africa’s total exports go to other African countries, trade with SADC members alone accounts for more than 80% of its intra-African trade, dominated by its Customs Union partners (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Eswatini), and South Africa is the continent’s largest exporter of manufactured goods (vehicles, machinery, processed food and electrical equipment) and a leading outward investor. Crucially, where postapartheid foreign policy advanced integration at the level of states and institutions, it has been South African multinationals that articulates integration in practice, treating the continent as a single expanding market. South Africa’s direct investment into the rest of Africa has run into the tens of billions of dollars, and South African firms typically maintain far larger continental footprints than their Western or Asian counterparts.
If a single thread runs through this history, it is economic interdependence. South Africa’s economy was not built beside the continent but out of it, and it remains bound to the continent today: a fact that no immigration statute can sever because the dependence began at the foundation. The Witwatersrand was made was made productive by labour drawn from across the subcontinent, and the wages, capitation fees and remittances that flowed through the WNLA system wove the fiscal life of the surrounding territories into the South African mineral economy.
The interdependence did not end with apartheid; it deepened and changed character. South Africa is the most industrialised economy in the region and its principal magnet for labour, capital and trade. Its banks, retailers, telecommunications firms, mining companies and breweries operate across the continent; its currency anchors the Common Monetary Area; the Southern African Customs Union, the world’s oldest, binds it fiscally to Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini and Namibia, several of which derive a substantial share of government revenue from the shared pool. Through SADC and, continentally, the African Continental Free Trade Area, South Africa is both a leading source of intra-African investment and a principal destination for the movement of goods, capital and people that the same migration debate seeks to regulate.
This is the deep structure beneath the legal framework. The labour that migrates to South Africa, the remittances that flow, the markets that South African firms serve, and the regional fiscus that depends on shared customs revenue are all expressions of a single of a single integrated economy that the colonial mineral revolution created and that post-colonial integration has formalised. The reform debate ultimately confronts this reality: a migration system can ration entry at the border, but it cannot disentangle an economy whose prosperity was, and remains, continental. South Africa’s history is the story of a country made by Africa as much as in Africa – and its law of migration is, in the end, an attempt to govern that inheritance.
This country was colonised from the 17th century onwards. Then it primarily drew European migrants. By the late 20th century, African migrants had replaced Europeans as the dominant migrant group in South Africa.
Following the democratic transition in 1994, migration from other African countries increased exponentially, driven by economic opportunity.
Kwame Nkrumah’s words are germane today, in that “the forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed influences that keep us apart”.
The recent spate of demonstrations against so-called foreign nationals, highlights the competition for limited resources and opportunities in South Africa’s poorest communities. Given the structure of the economy, government must strive to always be in charge as it responds to the cries of the unemployed, poor and marginalised sections of society. Failure to maintain authority on the part of government invites lawlessness and near anarchy with devastating consequences.
Political Leaders need to know that they are not only responsible for the way they lead but also for what is done by those they lead, particularly in times of crisis and upheavals. Presently the tourism and agriculture sectors of the South African economy have been negatively affected by the crusade against so-called foreign “Africans”. Both these sectors are creators of sorely-needed jobs in our country and the region.
As I conclude, I leave you with the following maxim; political stability is a precondition for economic development.
I thank you.