Ghana repatriates citizens amid systemic failures: How neoliberal migration policies and post-apartheid xenophobia intersect in South Africa
Original framing: “Ghana welcomes home citizens evacuated from South Africa” — Al Jazeera
The voices of African migrants in South Africa’s informal economy—who face daily harassment but are rarely quoted in media—are entirely absent from this narrative. Ghanaian returnees, many of whom were low-wage laborers, are framed as victims rather than agents with insights into systemic failures. Women migrants, who often work in domestic sectors and face compounded discrimination, are invisible in the coverage. The framing also ignores the role of African diaspora communities in both countries, who could mediate cross-cultural tensions.
This episode exemplifies how neoliberal economic policies—privatization of public services, austerity, and the erosion of labor rights—create the conditions for xenophobic violence, while states like Ghana and South Africa scramble to manage the symptoms rather than address the causes.
The repatriation narrative distracts from the complicity of both governments in labor export systems that prioritize remittances over equitable development, and from the role of multinational corporations in perpetuating precarious work. A systemic solution requires reimagining migration not as a crisis to be contained but as a natural process to be governed through solidarity, as seen in Ubuntu philosophy or *harambee* traditions. The trickster’s lens reveals the absurdity of sovereign states policing each other’s citizens while failing their own, suggesting that true sovereignty lies in collective self-determination. Without addressing the structural inequalities that force Africans to migrate in the first place, repatriation policies will remain Band-Aids on a gaping wound.