The uneasy convergence between failing governments and global elites rarely arrives announced. It creeps in behind manufactured enemies: migrants, queer people, “foreign values”, who are turned into convenient screens for anger that should be aimed upwards, not sideways.
Across the African continent, and in South Africa in particular, this pattern is hardening into a governing technique: take a structurally broken economy, add collapsing public trust, and then offer people a target they are allowed to hate.
When material conditions deteriorate, rulers have two basic options: fix things or find someone to blame. In Uganda, as one example, queer communities have become the regime’s lightning rod when corruption and incompetence threaten to boil over; anti‑LGBTIQA+ crackdowns arrive not as isolated “moral” outbursts, but as crisis‑management tools that redirect public fury away from state failures and toward a small, vulnerable minority.
South Africa runs a similar script, only with different primary targets. Here, migrants, especially Black Africans from elsewhere on the continent, are framed as the reason jobs are scarce, crime is high, and services are crumbling.
Civil society organisations have had to warn explicitly against using African migrants as scapegoats for South Africa’s structural failures, reminding us that a refugee child did not cause overcrowded schools, and a Malawian shopkeeper did not write the austerity budgets that hollowed out the state.
This is not random prejudice; it is policy by scapegoat. Blaming migrants, queer people, or any conveniently marked “outsider” is far cheaper than redistributing land, confronting predatory corporations, or dismantling entrenched patronage networks.
The targets differ from country to country, but the underlying technology of rule is the same: channel frustration away from those who set the economic rules, and towards those who merely suffer under them in different ways.
Recent research by The Other Foundation exposes just how carefully this technology operates in South Africa. Its “Admission Reserved” survey, drawing on data produced in collaboration with the Human Sciences Research Council, traces public attitudes towards LGBTIQA+ people and finds a complicated picture.
On the one hand, there has been a significant, measurable rise in acceptance: more South Africans now support equal rights and same‑sex marriage than a decade ago, and a growing majority agree that queer people should enjoy the same protections as anyone else. On the other hand, the survey also finds a minority who openly admit to harassing or even physically attacking LGBTIQA+ people, and a much larger group who see such violence as, at best, understandable.
What makes the study particularly revealing is the link it draws between attitudes toward queer people and attitudes toward immigrants. Those who hold hostile views of LGBTIQA+ people are significantly more likely to express hostility toward immigrants as well, suggesting that anti‑LGBTIQA+ and anti‑migrant sentiments are not separate streams, but different outlets for the same manufactured hostility.
The Daily Maverick has aptly described this pattern as “transferable hate”: the public trained to despise migrants today can easily be primed to despise queer people tomorrow, or vice versa.
Once you see this, the illusion of isolated “moral panics” falls apart. What we are dealing with is an emerging architecture of control that systematically trains people to punch down in multiple directions at once. The specific “enemy of the day” is less important than the function they serve.
Today, it may be undocumented migrants and queers; tomorrow, it may be environmental defenders, striking workers or dissident journalists. The list is fully editable. The constant is that the enemy is always nearby and vulnerable, never distant and powerful.
At the psychological level, this is sold as a form of dignity. Here, the analogy with the disempowered worker is brutally instructive. Imagine a worker who spends each day being humiliated by a boss whose wealth depends on underpaying him. He cannot speak back; his survival is held hostage.
When he goes home, the only space where he feels powerful is his family, and so he becomes a tyrant there, turning those closest to him into proxies for the boss he dares not confront.
The violence does not restore his dignity, but it offers a sick imitation of agency.
Our current politics of scapegoating scale this domestic pattern up to the level of the state. Citizens are humiliated daily by unemployment, collapsing infrastructure, load-shedding, and a political class that treats public funds as private reserves.
Direct confrontation with these elites is either risky, fragmented, or carefully defanged by a mixture of repression, patronage, and procedural delay. Into that frustration, governments and their backers insert proxy targets: the migrant shopkeeper, the queer neighbour, the “Westernised” woman, the sex worker, the foreign student.
Violence against these targets is not an unfortunate by‑product; it is therapeutic by design. It grants people a counterfeit sense of empowerment: you may not be able to discipline the billionaire looting your country, but you can discipline the queer kid in your church; you may not be able to evict the corrupt minister, but you can evict the undocumented neighbour.
Hate and exclusion are repackaged as moral courage, allowing those who feel powerless in the workplace and in politics to feel briefly powerful on the street, at the border, in the pulpit.
Politically, this technique relies on a quieter convergence of interests between failing governments and global elites. At first glance, they may appear opposed: national leaders railing against “Western cultural imperialism”, Western governments condemning “African homophobia”. Yet in material terms, they often want the same thing: predictable stability, even if it is soaked in violence; populations that are angry but divided, too busy fighting one another to mount coherent challenges to austerity, debt peonage or extractive megaprojects.
There is a pattern. Migrants are demonised on talk radio and in vigilante campaigns while cheap migrant labour continues to feed mines, farms, and service sectors owned or financed by local and Western capital.
Queer communities are targeted in orchestrated moral panics in the name of “traditional values”, while international finance flows unimpeded to governments that guarantee deregulation, resource extraction, and debt repayment.
In South Africa, waves of xenophobic violence that Human Rights Watch has painstakingly documented as cyclical and deadly do little to disrupt agreements around border enforcement or investment protection between Pretoria and Western capitals; if anything, they are folded into a shared obsession with “security” and “order”.
In this configuration, scapegoating is a cheap governance technology that suits both sides. It costs almost nothing compared to serious redistribution or institutional reform, yet it delivers compliance, and often applause, from those who mistake punitive identity politics for justice. The spectacle of cracking down on migrants or queer people provides cover for quietly signing another investor‑friendly mining licence, another debt agreement, another outsourcing contract.
In all of this, vulnerable people are props. The queer Ugandan, the Zimbabwean street trader in Johannesburg, the Congolese asylum seeker in Cape Town – they are cast as civilisational threats so that the real threats (climate breakdown, financialised land grabs, militarised policing) can be normalised as business as usual. The effect is to naturalise downward‑facing resentment and upward‑facing obedience.
The thread that ties all of this together is manufactured consent. We are being sold hatred and fear as if we freely chose them, as if they emerged organically from culture or faith rather than from a meticulously curated menu of enemies that, coincidentally, leaves billionaires and global financiers untouched.
With every “common sense” conversation about closing borders, every casual joke about “these people” and their “lifestyle”, every sermon that pins national decay on queer desire, we are signing a debit order against our own humanity, and we are not checking the terms.
Each time we nod along to xenophobic rhetoric, to anti‑LGBTI crackdowns, to the idea that “those people” are the reason for our suffering, we cancel the possibility of solidarity between those who are actually being squeezed by the same systems.
We grant our rulers an alibi: if the problem is always the migrant or the queer neighbour, it is never the rigged procurement tender, the offshore account, the corporate tax break, the IMF‑dictated budget cut. We train ourselves to love our chains because they come decorated with the fantasy of being on the right side of moral order.
The most dangerous feature of this arrangement is that it does not feel imposed.
It feels like culture, like morality, like defending one’s community. That is how consent is manufactured in our time: not only by banning dissent outright, but by teaching people to direct their dissent downwards, at those with even less power, and to experience that direction as righteous.
In that sense, The Other Foundation’s Admission Reserved survey is not just a snapshot of attitudes to queer people; it is a warning that the same circuits of hostility connecting homophobia to xenophobia can be plugged into any new target that elites choose to designate next.
The question is whether we are willing to inspect the receipts for this hatred – to ask who profits when we hate this neighbour, whose stability is secured when we accept that our real enemies are poor people who crossed a border or dared to love differently, rather than a class that lives above consequences.
Once we start reading that fine print, the truth becomes painfully obvious: the scapegoats are not the problem; they are the early warning system.
The real danger lies with those who keep handing us new scapegoats and counting on us never to look up.
Dr Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.