Mcebisi Jonas, MTN Group Chairma,n has used the funeral service of Zimbabwean-born activist and public servant Thokozani Damasane to mount a sweeping attack on xenophobia, ethnic politics and state failure in South Africa, warning that the country’s crisis cannot be solved by blaming foreigners.
MTN Group Chairman, Mcebisi Jonas
Delivering what many described as one of the most forceful interventions yet by a senior African business leader on South Africa’s immigration debate, Jonas said the persistence of anti-foreigner sentiment was a symptom of deeper governance failures, political opportunism and the erosion of a shared moral vision.
He argued that inequality, unemployment, corruption and weak institutions would remain even if all foreigners left the country, insisting that the real problem lay in the failure of the state to govern effectively.
“Foreigners can leave tomorrow – inequality will be with us,” he said. “Foreigners will leave tomorrow – unemployment will be with us. Foreigners will leave tomorrow – our police will remain corrupt.”
Jonas, a former South African Deputy Minister of Finance, made the remarks at a funeral service that had drawn mourners from civic, political and business circles. His speech, which blended philosophy, memory, political critique and grief, has since circulated widely across South Africa and beyond.
Jonas said a central question had stayed with him as he drove to the service: what home meant to Damasane, a man who had been born and educated in Zimbabwe before moving to South Africa during the post-apartheid period.
“I was thinking, what is home to Damasane?” he told mourners. “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.”
He described Damasane as someone who arrived in South Africa “as an outcast” but chose to immerse himself in the struggles of the country 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 sharpest portion of Jonas’ speech came when he turned to the wave of xenophobic rhetoric that has repeatedly flared in South Africa, particularly against migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria, Malawi and other African countries.
He dismissed the argument that foreigners were responsible for the country’s social and economic hardship, saying that such claims merely masked the failures of political leadership and public institutions.
“The problem is the failure of the state,” he said. “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 accused politicians of exploiting public frustration for electoral gain, warning that communities under pressure are easily manipulated by leaders who offer scapegoats instead of solutions.
“When people feel the burn, they become vulnerable to politicians whose sole purpose is to be elected and re-elected,” he said. “Some of them have no credibility whatsoever. But they lead marches and tell our people that the problem is not us – it is foreigners.”
Jonas also used the occasion to offer a sustained critique of tribalism and ethnic identity politics, describing them as colonial constructs that have survived into the present through political manipulation.
“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.”
According to him, colonial administrations deliberately sharpened differences between communities in order to divide and control them.
“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 tribe was born,” he said.
Jonas argued that the same logic now fuels xenophobic violence and exclusion, with people increasingly persecuted not because of what they have done but because of who they are perceived to be.
He said liberation movements were also guilty of keeping ethnic identities alive for political convenience.
“Liberation movements still sustain this thing of tribes – Zulu and Xhosa – and we sustain this thing as if it is real,” he said. “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 in this country we must banish.”
In explaining Damasane’s significance, Jonas drew on the writings of Frantz Fanon, the anti-colonial thinker and psychiatrist whose work shaped liberation struggles across Africa and the Global South.
He compared Damasane to Fanon, noting that both men were born outside the societies they later helped shape and serve.
Fanon, he said, was “born elsewhere” and was “not a Muslim,” yet became one of the most respected theorists of the Algerian Revolution. The parallel, Jonas suggested, was deliberate: Damasane, too, had chosen commitment over comfort.
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it,” Jonas quoted Fanon as saying. “Damasane understood the mission. And he did not betray it.”
He also recalled a conversation Damasane had once had with a young man who questioned the presence of foreigners in South Africa. Damasane’s reply, Jonas said, had remained with him.
“Damasane said to this guy: just wait fifteen or twenty years. You will also be wanting to leave your country.”
Jonas said those words now sounded prophetic in light of worsening inequality, exclusion and corruption.
“As I stand up today, I look at South Africa. The level of oppression and inequality, the level of exclusion of our people, the level of corruption, the betrayal of the dream of liberation – those words of Damasane ring very loud in my ears,” he said.
Jonas ended on a note of continental solidarity, saying South Africa’s future was inseparable from Africa’s future.
“We are a nation embedded in Africa,” he said. “And without Africa, our growth as a country – economically – our fortune is intertwined with the growth of Africa. South Africa is nothing without Africa. And Africa is nothing without South Africa.”
He also urged mourners to rethink the way success and dignity are measured, saying merit should not be reduced to wealth alone.
“Sometimes this thing called meritocracy is measured in wealth. No. It is values, it is principle, it is integrity. And your father had all of that,” he said.
Jonas further stressed that a person’s legal or social worth should not be judged by their origin.
“We cannot judge people by their origin,” he said. “We cannot determine the legal status of people by their origin.”
Jonas’ intervention comes at a time when xenophobia remains one of South Africa’s most combustible social and political issues, with periodic attacks on foreign nationals continuing to draw outrage across the continent.
The consequences have often extended beyond South Africa’s borders, triggering diplomatic tensions, travel advisories and boycott calls in parts of Africa. For pan-African companies like MTN, whose operations depend on cross-border trust and political stability, the debate is not only moral but commercial.
That context made Jonas’ decision to speak so directly at a funeral especially notable. Rather than a corporate forum or policy panel, he used a farewell to make a wider argument about belonging, leadership and the future of the continent.
In doing so, he turned Damasane’s burial into something larger than a memorial: a warning against the politics of fear, and a plea for a South Africa that remembers its place in Africa.
