The South Africa Council of Churches (SACC) this week launched a national indaba which aims to engage interested parties in a search for solutions to tensions over foreigners living and working in South Africa.
SACC general secretary Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana says in a statement that their priority is to create “a national process towards a stable national environment where the growing lawlessness over non-South Africans can be addressed before it spills into the broader decline of the rule of law, through what may seem like ‘justifiable’ acts of public frustration”.
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He says that deep poverty gnawing at the lives of the economically excluded majority of South Africans is behind murmurings that “non-South Africans are stealing our jobs” and periodic acts of brutal violence against foreigners.
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“It is one manifestation of what the SACC terms the failure of democratic South Africa to achieve the promise of the post-apartheid South Africa. The failure to achieve this makes for the growth of a scarcity mentality that grips poor communities in the absence of hope,” he says.
Mpulwana says that It must be noted that campaigns against non-South Africans are not confined to the poor communities, as they also reach to the professionals and other middle-class environments, as has begun in the case of foreign doctors.
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The SACC invites all interested parties to submit their proposals in writing to nationbuilding@sacc.org.za for the attention of the secretariat of the National Indaba on Non-South African Persons in our Society and Economy by March 31.
“Our request is that these public submissions must be solution-focused, aimed at presenting their recommendations for how these challenges should be resolved in the short and long-term,” says Mpulwana.
Submissions will be evaluated through an intensive, multi-sector engagement and research process leading up to the hosting of a broad solutions dialogue forum from June 21 to 23.
Other, complementary nation-building initiatives in the pipeline include The Initiative for Economic Transformation for the Excluded Majority and the Nation-Building Initiative of Healing & Reconciliation for a Common Identity – the “One Identity South Africa” campaign, said Mpulwana.
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