No victory in hounding a young woman out of Miss SA

Somewhere in SA today there is at least one cabinet minister, some civil servants and many ordinary citizens who are celebrating that they ensured Chidimma Adetshina did not get to take part in the finals of the Miss SA contest.

From Gayton McKenzie and his Patriotic Alliance straight down to the hate-spewing, identity-hiding, fake activists on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, they are all one and the same thing: Ignoramuses who have a simplistic, naive, inexperienced, unsophisticated and dangerous view of the world and the forces at play globally today.

We should be ashamed to have such ignoramuses in so-called “high office”.

We are in huge trouble when a cabinet minister seriously thinks hounding a 23-year-old out of the Miss SA contest is any kind of victory or that it will solve our myriad border and migration problems.

More than 400 people have been arrested across the UK over the past two weeks following a week of shop-burning, looting, vandalism and rioting by right-wing racists who were targeting immigrants, Muslims, blacks and other minorities.

Filled with false information fed to them by faceless and unverified sources online, they rushed off to do what Gayton McKenzie tells his supporters to do: “Abahambe!” (They must go!)

You know why these racists were burning down their country? In late July, three young girls were stabbed and killed by a 17-year-old black suspect in the northern English town of Southport.

Immediately afterwards the social media lie factory went into overdrive, with false information shared thick and fast that the alleged killer was a Muslim immigrant named Ali al-Shakati.

This information came from no official source. Not from the police. Not from a credible news platform.

Even when the real suspect, an Axel Rudakubana, apparently the son of a Rwandan couple who had lived his entire life in the UK, was arrested, the false information persisted.

So, these ignoramuses, branded “far-right thugs” by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, went out and burnt down shops and spewed their hate against Muslims, immigrants and blacks.

Let me be clear: these are people who would be calling McKenzie and his xenophobic friends by the K-word if they met them in the streets of Johannesburg.

That is who those who led the vile campaign of hate against the Miss SA are indirectly identifying with and mimicking.

McKenzie and his horde think they are revolutionaries. They are not.

They are garden-variety tribalists and populists who hate their fellow Africans and hate their own blackness.

Ask the Brits who were protesting this week why they are not targeting Ukrainian immigrants. Ask McKenzie why he isn’t targeting the many Russians running around Johannesburg with SA passports. The answer: They are white.

That Adetshina did not take part in the Miss SA pageant on Saturday does not mean that home affairs will be fixed, that fake passports will be a thing of the past, that jobs will be created for the poor, or that more desperate people will not be swimming across the Limpopo River to seek greener pastures here.

There will be more of all our troubles no matter how many insults you hurl at that poor young woman and her parents.

Here is how to solve SA’s immigration problems.

First, tell President Ramaphosa and his ANC to stop making nice with dictators. Most illegal immigrants in SA are from Zimbabwe.

They are here because our presidents, from Thabo Mbeki to Jacob Zuma and now Cyril Ramaphosa, have had their heads so far up the behinds of that country’s dictators (Robert Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa) that many more refugees will be coming.

Over the past two weeks, hundreds of activists have been arrested in Zimbabwe. Watch this week as your president hugs and jives and makes nice with Mnangagwa, a man who according to Sadc stole the elections in 2023.

Second, systematically strengthen SA identification systems to ensure that IDs, passports, birth certificates and others cannot be bought, forged or fraudulently acquired.

Unless this is done, you will have hundreds of illegal Ethiopians being trafficked here, or Libyans training in Mpumalanga.

Finally, just fix the economy so that South Africans can have jobs. It is truly pathetic to see South Africans moaning about foreigners stealing “our women” or “our jobs” as if they came to earth assigned a job or a wife by virtue of being born here.

If a Nigerian man “takes” your woman, then you never deserved her in the first place.

The bottom line is that we have serious systemic issues to fix in SA. I have not seen the government do much about these problems in the years after Thabo Mbeki was ousted in 2008. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

Let me repeat it for the populists and political morons at the back: Investigating Adetshina and driving her out of the Miss SA contest will not solve any of the many serious problems SA has.

In fact, they will get worse.