When the migrants are gone, who will they blame?

Walking up the stairs along the edge of the Constitutional Court and seeing the number of homeless makeshift tents conjures up an irreconcilable yet intertwined helix – living is the protection that the Constitution was meant to afford.

It makes sense that displaced and homeless people should feel the warmth of the Constitutional Court.

It’s somewhat poetic. That poem would turn into an elegy were it to explore whether this was the life that the Constitution set out to create.

For the migrants among them, the fear of 30 June must be as pervasive as that of their South African neighbours any time the police have to clear the area lest a foreign diplomat see the state of the nation displayed in Braamfontein rather than announced from between Bo-Kaap and District 6.

At some point, they will probably look at each other and ask why a diplomat is being treated better than any of them right on the doorstep of the institution meant to safeguard the document, ostensibly pushing an ideal of equality.

Oddly, the local won’t ask what will really happen when his migrant neighbour is gone. Few will come to realise that the only real effect is that an Akon hit from 2004 will become more applicable.

What happens after Tuesday?

Illegal migration is indeed an issue to be resolved. As is the transformation of the private economy. As is land distribution. As is housing. As is water scarcity.

If only there were an award for the country that best uses inequality to create more inequality.

No matter how many Bs or Es they flood into the acronym, I’d bet reform policies didn’t do much for the people who will be protesting on Tuesday.

The money that was meant for water maintenance and expansion? That’s with a couple of water mafiosos. 5 million RDP houses since 1994 seems amazing until you factor in that we’ve gotten 20 million more people in the same space of time, too.

Oh, and land? That’s gotten some lawyers, academics and politicians some airtime, but what else of it?

These are all glorious, magnificent and incredible ideas that haven’t made the country a better place for all. If anything, they’ve just served as a soapbox for a couple of people to make us mad, and themselves relevant in the process.

You can do a lot with a desperate population, but the one thing you have to keep doing is to keep them desperate. Ain’t nobody with a good job, safe house and content life hitting the streets on Tuesday.

Those protests are going to be made up by people who are quite angry. Anger alone is not going to get them to protest. Anger alone is not going to make them foment. They need a binding agent and a person to feed it to them.

That’s where the leadership telling them that they must rise up against unfair land policies/business jobs/housing/water pop out and give them something specific to be angry about.

Today, it’s migrants.

“Once everybody is angry and has been told what to be angry about, those who told them will selflessly claim the ward councillor or MP salary and courageously lead them into anger about something else.

I mean, if you’re angry about migrants, the problems with all the other stuff must have been solved, right? Otherwise, people will still be telling you to be angry about that stuff.

The solution

If you want to stop migrant hate, you need to do two things: obviously, you need to clean up the migration system, plug the loopholes and stop giving idiots low-hanging fruit to make baseless claims from.

The better and longer-term solution would be to really challenge the haters and make them ask themselves what would really change in their lives if the migrants weren’t around?

It’s not like any of the other radical solutions have made life that much better. Otherwise, there probably wouldn’t be as much enthusiasm about Tuesday.