MTN Group Chairman, Mcebisi Jonas, used the funeral service of Zimbabwean-born activist and public servant Thokozani Damasane to deliver a sweeping and unsparing condemnation of the ongoing anti-foreigner sentiment in South Africa and how it is a symptom of state failure being cynically exploited by politicians with no interest in genuine solutions.
The speech, which drew on philosophy, personal memory, and sharp political analysis, has circulated widely since the service and is being discussed across South African civil society as one of the most substantive interventions by a senior business figure into a crisis that has repeatedly damaged South Africa’s standing on the African continent.
Jonas, who served as South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Finance before his transition to the private sector, is now Chairman of MTN Group – the Johannesburg-headquartered telecommunications giant that operates across 19 African markets and has a direct commercial stake in continental integration and political stability.
A Question Asked on the Drive to the Funeral
Jonas told mourners that the central question of his remarks had come to him as he drove to the service. He had been listening, he said, to voices calling for foreigners to leave South Africa – and the contrast between that sentiment and the life he was about to commemorate stopped him.
“I was thinking, what is home to Damasane?” he said. “Because I understand, and I understood very early in life, that home is where humanity is. Home is about humanness. It is about the good of humanity and striving for the good of humanity.”
Thokozani Damasane was born and educated in Zimbabwe before relocating to South Africa during the post-apartheid transition period. Jonas described him as arriving “as an outcast” into a country still finding its post-liberation footing – and choosing, nonetheless, to commit himself entirely to its struggles and its people.
He immersed himself deeply into the struggles, into the pains of South Africans, and he became one of us,” Jonas said. “In Damasane’s strength, our strength as South Africa and South Africans are reflected. And in his weaknesses, our own weaknesses are reflected.”
“The Problem Is the Failure of the State”
The speech’s most politically charged passage came when Jonas turned directly to the question of whether removing foreign nationals would address South Africa’s underlying socioeconomic crises and answered with a categorical no.
“Foreigners can leave tomorrow – inequality will be with us,” he told the congregation. “Foreigners will leave tomorrow – unemployment will be with us. Foreigners will leave tomorrow – our police will remain corrupt. Foreigners will leave tomorrow – our politicians will still be concerned with one thing: being elected and re-elected.”
He placed responsibility for the crisis squarely on the state. “The problem is the failure of the state. The state doesn’t manage immigration. It doesn’t manage its borders. It doesn’t enforce law enforcement. It doesn’t manage education. What are you expecting?”
Jonas argued that this failure created fertile ground for political manipulation. “When people feel the burn, they become vulnerable to politicians whose sole purpose is to be elected and re-elected. Some of them have no credibility whatsoever. But they lead marches and tell our people that the problem is not us – it is foreigners.”
Tribe as a Colonial Technology
In a passage that drew significant attention from those present, Jonas offered a sustained historical critique of tribalism, arguing that ethnic identity and the violence it enables, is a colonial inheritance rather than an authentic African value.
“The tribe is a product of colonial powers,” he said. “You would notice that it is so dominant in areas where the English conquered, because they used something called the principle of indirect rule. You have got to divide these people by psychologically enhancing the notion that one is different from the other. That’s how the notion of a tribe was born.”
He argued that this colonial logic had mutated into the engine driving contemporary xenophobic violence.
“You would see in the streets, it’s no longer about whether you are from South Africa or not from South Africa. It’s about the tribe, it’s about who you are, you are not like us, and you are different, and therefore we have to persecute you. Something fundamental has been lost in our country. Something fundamental has been lost in our nations.”
Jonas was equally direct in his criticism of liberation movements, including South Africa’s own, for sustaining ethnic divisions for political purposes. “Liberation movements still sustain this thing of tribes – Zulu and Xhosa – and we sustain this thing as if it is real. It is in our heads. We’re creating it because it makes us feel big. Identity politics – we must banish them in our country. Ethno-nationalism is something that in this country we must banish.”
A Damasane Warning, Recalled
Jonas recounted a conversation he had witnessed between Damasane and a young man who had challenged the right of foreigners to be in South Africa. Damasane’s response, Jonas said, had stayed with him ever since.
