Follow the Money: The Structural Persecution of African Migrants in South Africa — and an Open Letter of Questions to Jacob Zuma
A crowdfunding page raised R13,167 in six months. With it, we are asked to believe, a movement mounted a coordinated, seven-month, nine-province campaign that emptied townships of Africans and drove tens of thousands across borders. The arithmetic is an insult. A Wits professor says plainly there is external funding. A trade union federation alleges a political hand and money. And the party whose members walk beside this movement has declared not one rand of private donations to South Africa’s Electoral Commission. This is not a mob. It is a structure — and structures have budgets, and budgets have owners.
What We Will Assert, and What We Will Only Ask
This investigation concerns a former President of the Republic of South Africa, a party sitting in its Parliament, and organisations that have been linked to deaths. So we will be scrupulous, and our scruple is not timidity — it is strategy. An allegation can be denied. A documented question cannot.
The line this investigation holds
We assert only what is documented. Every figure, link, quotation and date below is drawn from the public record, from mainstream reporting, from company and electoral filings, or from named individuals speaking on the record.
We make no finding that any named person funds or directs any movement. Where a party or person has denied something, the denial is printed. Where a claim is an allegation, it is labelled as one.
And then we ask the questions the record demands — publicly, precisely, and with the whole continent reading. We are not the court. We are the record. Let those with answers give them.
This Was Not a Riot. It Was an Operation.
The single most important fact about 30 June is the one least reported: it was announced on 7 December 2025. The deadline for every undocumented African to leave South Africa was issued nearly seven months in advance, by March and March affiliate and Insizwa nobunsizwa leader Nkosikhona Ndabandaba — who separately told CNN he was the architect of the 30 June deadline. This was not a crowd losing its temper on a hot afternoon. It was a campaign with a launch date, a countdown, and a target.
International reporting reached the same conclusion. Where the 2008 pogroms were organised locally — a neighbourhood, a leader, a council — this generation of movements is, in the words of that reporting, “far more structured,” having “taken on a national dimension.” Branded. Registered. Legally represented. Media-trained. Simultaneous. Someone taught this movement how to be a machine — and machines cost money.
The Arithmetic That Does Not Work
Now to the ledger, and to the number at the heart of this investigation.
Officially, these movements say they rely on public fundraising. March and March’s own platform says so. And the public record of that fundraising is this: a BackaBuddy crowdfunding campaign that, over six months, raised R13,167 against a R20,000 goal, on donations averaging around R200. In hard currency, that is roughly the price of a modest second-hand car. It is not the price of a seven-month, nine-province national campaign.
Consider what such a campaign actually consumes: transport and buses across nine provinces; sound systems and staging; branded materials and regalia; national media operations and social-media amplification; legal representation — including litigation against the state; coordinators; venues; travel; accommodation; security. Ask any legitimate civil-society organisation in Africa what a single national day of action costs, and then set it against R13,167. The gap is not a discrepancy. It is a chasm, and something is living in it.
Landau is not a partisan; he is among the most respected migration researchers in Africa. And he is not alone. Reporting notes that these movements’ “actual sources of funding remain very opaque,” and that “the scale and sophistication of March and March’s actions across South Africa have prompted questions about who finances its mobilisation.” The general secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions, Zwelinzima Vavi, went further on national radio, alleging: “There’s money involved … there is a political hand of the very same forces that generated the July 2021 unrest.” An anti-xenophobia campaigner has openly urged the state to use “intelligence operations to cut the funding supply” to these movements.
And here is the point on which this entire investigation turns: if the money is innocent, it can be shown. Immediately. In a single afternoon. Publish the bank statements. Publish the donor list. Publish the audited financials that a registered non-profit is obliged to keep. Opacity is a choice — and in a matter where people have died, it is a choice that demands an explanation.
The MK Question — What the Record Actually Shows
March and March insists it is “apolitical” and “non-aligned to any political party.” Here is what is on the record. We assert nothing beyond it.
The Black Hole: A Major Party That Declares Nothing
Now we arrive at the fact that should end this argument, and which South Africa’s own institutions have already published.
South Africa has a Political Party Funding Act, and an Electoral Commission that publishes who gives money to whom. It was passed precisely so that a democracy could see the hands behind its politics. In the most recent quarterly donor report, the picture is clear: the DA declared R57.3 million. Rise Mzansi declared R30 million. ActionSA declared R9.9 million.
And the MK Party — which won nearly 15% of the national vote in 2024, entered Parliament as the country’s third-largest party, and runs an expensive national political machine — declared nothing at all. It does not appear in the donor report. Neither does the EFF. As one South African analysis put it plainly: it stretches credulity to believe two large and active political machines operated through that period without meaningful private financial support — and the reporting system is flawed if some parties simply do not declare who gives them money, with no consequences.
Set that beside the second fact, which comes not from MK’s enemies but from MK’s own members. In late 2025, members of the party’s parliamentary caucus reportedly resolved to write to Jacob Zuma and deputy president Tony Yengeni, calling for a forensic investigation into more than R70 million allegedly siphoned from parliamentary funds — money allocated for constituency offices for its 58 MPs which insiders said had produced no visible offices, and may have gone to inflated salaries, travel, accommodation and security contracts. That is an allegation, and it remains one. But it was made by his own caucus, and it was addressed to him.
And It Is Not Only One Party — Which Makes It Worse
If this dossier accused a single man and stopped there, it would be politics. It is worse than politics. South Africa’s anti-migrant machine was co-written by much of its political class, and honesty requires that we say so.
Investigative reporting concluded that while MK and ActionSA courted March and March and appeared to work toward a similar agenda, other parties “jumped on the xenophobic bandwagon,” continuing “illegal immigrant” rhetoric ahead of the polls to harvest votes, while still others simply stayed silent. Operation Dudula’s leaders have received public support from Patriotic Alliance figures Gayton McKenzie and Kenny Kunene; the movement’s early Johannesburg incarnation was aligned with the sentiments of former mayor Herman Mashaba. And the Government of National Unity failed to present a unified front, largely ceding the narrative to the vigilante groups. Questions to the Presidency went unanswered.
That is the true architecture of the structural persecution of African migrants in South Africa: not one villain, but an entire political market that discovered migrants were cheap to blame and expensive to defend — and a state that decided, in an election year, that African lives were an acceptable price for African votes.
Who can compel the answer
The instruments exist. South Africa does not need a new law; it needs the will to use the ones it has. The Non-Profit Organisations Act imposes reporting and financial-accountability duties on registered NPOs — and March and March is registered. The Companies Act and CIPC records name directors. The Political Party Funding Act and the IEC can and must be enforced against any party that declares nothing. The Financial Intelligence Centre can trace flows. SARS can audit. PAIA — the Promotion of Access to Information Act — gives journalists and citizens a statutory route to records. The Hawks and the NPA can investigate incitement. And the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has already demanded that South Africa prosecute “those involved in organising or inciting” these acts — not merely the hands that lit the fires. Every one of these bodies has the power to answer the question this article asks. Not one of them has.
To Jacob Zuma, From Pan-African Eyes
Mr Zuma: We Are Not Accusing You. We Are Asking You. And Africa Is Listening for the Answer.
Dear Mr Zuma,
You know, better than almost any living man, what it costs Africa to protect a South African. You were sheltered, trained, fed and hidden by African states that could not afford it. Tanzania. Zambia. Angola. Mozambique. Zimbabwe. They took the bombs so that you could take the freedom. The frontline states buried their own children for South Africa, and never once sent an invoice.
And you carry, as the name of your party, the most sacred noun in that struggle: uMkhonto weSizwe — the Spear of the Nation. A spear forged, sharpened and carried across this continent by Africans, for Africans, against a regime that decided some human beings did not belong. That is the inheritance you have chosen to put on a ballot paper.
So we will not insult you with an accusation we cannot prove. We will do something you will find harder: we will ask you, in public, the questions the record leaves on your doorstep.
You may answer none of these, and that is your right. But understand what your silence purchases. It purchases the belief — spreading now across this continent, from Accra to Lilongwe to Harare — that the man who was carried to freedom on African shoulders looked away while Africans were dragged from their homes in the country those shoulders freed. And that belief, once it sets, no press conference will lift.
We have watched the women — Jacinta, Zandile — take the cameras, the court cases, the ridicule and the blame. We have watched them front the marches and answer for the dead. And we have watched the men who benefit stand well back from the light. Mr Zuma, if this movement has nothing to do with you, say so in words your own supporters cannot misread. If it does, then Africa is owed the truth, and so are the families burying their sons. Either way, hiding behind two women is not the conduct of the spear of any nation.
You were, once, a man who understood that an African is an African is an African. Africa has not forgotten that man. We are asking whether you have.
We are watching. Not with hatred — we leave that to others — but with the long, patient, unforgiving memory of a continent that has seen sell-outs before and knows exactly what they cost. Answer the questions, Mr Zuma. Or let the silence answer for you.
Tete Getty Research Institute (TGRI) · TeteGetty.com
Neither East nor West — Africa first. 14 July 2026.
Should Africa Isolate South Africa? The Argument, Honestly Put.
This platform now states a position, and marks it clearly as advocacy rather than fact. We believe Africa should apply structured, calibrated, collective pressure on the South African state until the structural persecution of African migrants is investigated, prosecuted and stopped.
We know the objection, and we make it ourselves: isolation punishes the poor. True. So the pressure must be aimed with precision — at the state and the political class, not at the South African people, who are themselves the victims of the lie that migrants caused their poverty. That means: AU and SADC pressure with an actual deadline; ACHPR follow-up with published compliance findings; coordinated diplomatic démarches; scrutiny in every continental forum South Africa wishes to lead; conditions attached to Africa’s cooperation, its markets, its platforms and its prestige.
And we make the argument without apology, because Africa has run this instrument before, and it worked. This continent boycotted, isolated and pressured apartheid South Africa — at enormous cost to itself — until it changed. The grandchildren of that campaign are now asking whether the same instrument must be raised again, against the same country, for the same offence: the belief that some human beings do not belong. That is not hatred. It is consistency. And South Africa, of all nations, cannot claim not to understand the language.
Jacinta Did Not Build This
I want to say something that will surprise those who expected only anger. Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma did not build this machine. A dismissed radio presenter with a private grievance and a crowdfunding page that raised thirteen thousand rand did not, by herself, engineer a seven-month, nine-province campaign that emptied townships across a G20 economy and moved tens of thousands of human beings across international borders. Somebody helped. Somebody paid. And somebody is letting her carry it.
That is the cruellest architecture of all: the front is a woman, and so is the sister movement’s leader, and so the cameras and the court papers and the continental fury land on them — while the men who benefit at the ballot box in November stand in the shade and say nothing. When this ends, as it will, Jacinta will be prosecuted or discarded, and the machine will simply grow a new face. That is what a front is for.
So Africa must stop hunting the face and start auditing the money. Publish the donors. Enforce the Party Funding Act. Open the NPO books. Send in the Financial Intelligence Centre. Prosecute the organisers and the inciters, as the African Commission has already demanded. Until then, every condemnation is theatre and every march is a rehearsal for the next one. Kana usinganzwisisi kwakabva mvura, unonyura — if you do not know where the water came from, you will drown in it. Africa is done drowning. Pamberi nechokwadi — forward with the truth. Hate is expensive, Mr Zuma. Somebody is paying. Africa intends to find out who.
Leave a Reply