A wall against crime or against the poor? As xenophobic attacks rise, critics say Black South Africans are fighting the wrong enemies

CAPE TOWN — A controversial $7 million wall rising along Cape Town’s N2 highway has reignited a painful debate about race, poverty, and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa.

For a growing number of pan-African voices, the structure is a symptom of something deeper: a dangerous misalignment of priorities among black South Africans, who are simultaneously turning violent against fellow African immigrants while a resurgent settler class consolidates power.

The nearly 9-kilometer “N2 Edge” safety barrier, branded by critics as an “apartheid wall,” is designed to separate the highway leading from Cape Town International Airport from the sprawling, impoverished black townships of Nyanga and surrounding settlements. The route has long been known as the “N2 hell run” due to frequent hijackings, smash-and-grab ambushes, and occasional deadly attacks on motorists.

City officials, led by the centre-right Democratic Alliance (DA), defend the R114 million (approximately $7 million) project as a necessary crime-fighting measure. Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said the road is used by “hundreds of thousands of people a day,” many of them local commuters who feel unsafe.

A woman was fatally stabbed at a traffic light just off the highway after leaving the airport complex in December 2025, an incident that accelerated the project’s approval.

But former anti-apartheid activist and cleric Allan Boesak has called the wall an attempt to “hide the poor.”

“They are trying to build a wall behind which they are trying to hide the poor,” Boesak said at a recent Ramadan community gathering. “They are trying to hide the fact that there is indeed a black Cape Town and a white Cape Town – a privileged Cape Town and a privileged-deprived Cape Town.”

A Wave of Xenophobic Violence

The wall controversy comes amid a resurgence of xenophobic and Afrophobic attacks across South Africa. In recent months, immigrants from Ghana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, and other African nations have been assaulted, robbed, and driven from their homes in townships near Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town (as shown in many viral videos inundating social media feeds).

Shops owned by foreign nationals have been looted, and at least seven people have been killed in xenophobic mob attacks since the beginning of the year, according to civil society monitors.

South African police have made dozens of arrests, but community leaders say the violence reflects deep-seated resentment over unemployment, housing shortages, and crime, frustrations that are frequently misdirected at fellow Africans.

One pro-African unity commentator, whose analysis has circulated widely in response to the recent violence, argues that black South Africans are being manipulated by a familiar colonial playbook.

“The settler class has always been unified,” the commentator, Shannel R Oliver wrote. “When will Africa be?”

The U.S.-based commentator pointed to historical precedents:

“The Belgians turned the Hutu against the Tutsi. The British divided the Igbo and the Yoruba, the Fante and the Ashanti — specifically to crush unified African resistance. Today the targets are Xhosa and Zulu, township against township, African immigrant against South African.”

Strategic Assets and Secessionist Ambitions

The wall’s construction also coincides with renewed efforts by some members of Cape Town’s white minority to break the Western Cape away from South Africa entirely. A UK-born immigrant named Phil Craig has been lobbying Washington to support secession, reportedly comparing Cape Town’s strategic value to Panama and Greenland — two territories former U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to seize by military force.

Oliver described Craig’s campaign as “an invitation to a foreign power to invade a sovereign nation” and “treason.”

Cape Town generates approximately 10% of South Africa’s entire GDP. With Red Sea shipping lanes disrupted by conflict, the Cape Sea Route has emerged as one of the world’s most strategically valuable maritime corridors.

“Whoever controls Cape Town controls the southern gateway of an entire continent,” Oliver warned.

Two Crises, One Question

On the ground in Nyanga, residents say the wall does nothing to address their own vulnerability to crime. According to police statistics, the Nyanga Police Station recorded the highest number of robberies with aggravating circumstances in the country between October and December 2025, and the second-highest number of murders — a 29% increase from the previous quarter.

“Walls might stop bullets but it doesn’t stop crime,” said city councillor Jonathan Cupido of the GOOD political party. Cupido accused the DA-led city government of trying to “hide what we cannot fix.”

At the Cape Town Mardi Gras festival this month, activists carried banners reading “Homes not walls!” — redirecting attention to the city’s deepening housing crisis. Nyanga Community Policing Forum chairman Dumisani Qwebe urged authorities to focus on improving living environments “rather than thinking of building a security wall on the N2.”

Yet as black South Africans protest the wall and, in other moments, attack African immigrants, the commentator’s central question lingers: Who is the real enemy?

“European immigrants are flooding in, buying up land and driving up costs, welcomed by the same settler class building the apartheid wall,” he wrote. “While South African communities are turned against each other, the settler class has always been unified. When will Africa be?”

City authorities have not responded to accusations that the wall is racially motivated. The N2 Edge project is proceeding as planned, with completion expected in early 2027.

Ghana’s decision to evacuate its citizens from South Africa amid rising xenophobic attacks has triggered a regional domino effect, with Nigeria now set to begin withdrawing its own nationals next week, according to Ghana’s High Commissioner to South Africa, H.E. Benjamin Quashie.

Speaking on Citi Eyewitness News, Quashie disclosed that discussions with his diplomatic counterparts suggest growing regional backing for Ghana’s stance, positioning Accra as the catalyst for what could become a continent-wide exodus.

“A lot of them are following what we have done. I am aware that Nigeria will be evacuating its citizens next week,” he said.

The High Commissioner’s remarks come in direct response to criticism from some South African figures, including politician Julius Malema, who has argued that Ghana overstated its decision to evacuate. Quashie’s disclosure that Africa’s most populous nation is preparing to follow Ghana’s lead appears to undercut those claims, suggesting that fears over foreign nationals’ safety are far from exaggerated.

Ghana began its evacuation exercise on Wednesday, May 28, with the first batch of 300 citizens arriving at Accra International Airport, where they were received by a government delegation led by Chief of Staff Julius Debrah and Foreign Affairs Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa. More than 800 Ghanaians have so far registered for voluntary evacuation following renewed fears over xenophobic attacks and insecurity targeting foreign nationals.

The evacuation exercise, announced earlier this month by Foreign Affairs Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, forms part of measures to ensure the safety and welfare of Ghanaians abroad. The government has indicated that returnees will receive transport support, reintegration assistance, psychosocial counselling, as well as access to employment and start-up support programmes.

With Nigeria’s evacuation now imminent, questions are mounting over whether other African nations with large diasporas in South Africa—including Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Mozambique—will similarly activate repatriation plans. The growing exodus threatens to deepen diplomatic tensions between South Africa and its continental partners, even as Ghana’s High Commissioner maintains that the evacuations are a necessary precaution rather than a hostile act.

For the hundreds of Ghanaians who have already registered to leave, the decision is deeply personal. Many have spent years building livelihoods in South Africa, only to feel forced out by rising hostility.

As one returnee from the first batch reportedly shared upon arrival in Accra, home now feels like the only safe option.

ACCRA – The collapse of military-led states in the Sahel is fueling arms trafficking and allowing jihadist networks to creep southward toward Ghana’s northern border, according to a sobering new analysis.

The analysis authored by Joseph McCarthy, an analyst and researcher specializing in governance, security, and political transitions in the region, warns that the self-styled Alliance of Sahel States (AES), comprising Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, has failed to contain extremism despite initial promises by the juntas that seized power in Bamako (2020), Ouagadougou (2022), and Niamey (2023).

Instead, the security situation has deteriorated dramatically.

‘State Presence Is Shrinking’

McCarthy notes that large portions of northern and eastern Burkina Faso are now either under jihadist influence or violently contested. In Mali, the regions of Taoudéni, Timbuktu, Ménaka, Gao, and much of Mopti remain outside effective state authority. While Niger retains a stronger foothold around Niamey and Maradi, insecurity is steadily creeping into Diffa, Tahoua, and Agadez.

“The trajectory across all three countries is identical: state presence is shrinking; militant mobility corridors are expanding southward,” McCarthy writes.

The analyst points to coordinated attacks across Mali in April 2026, striking Mopti, Gao, Kidal, Sévaré, and approach routes to Bamako simultaneously, as confirmation that Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and Islamic State affiliates are growing more sophisticated, more coordinated, and operationally bolder.

The Threat to Ghana

While Ghana has not yet experienced large-scale jihadist violence, McCarthy argues the country is not insulated from what is coming.

“The expansion of JNIM and IS-affiliated operations into southern Burkina Faso has intensified arms trafficking, infiltration networks, and radicalization risks along Ghana’s northern border,” he writes.

McCarthy specifically highlights the Bawku conflict, rooted in ethnic and chieftaincy tensions, as “precisely the kind of local instability that extremist organizations have exploited elsewhere to gain a foothold.”

Ghana’s Security Response

According to the analyst, Ghanaian security agencies have responded with Operation Conquered Fist, expanded border surveillance, joint intelligence operations, and counter-extremism programs.

McCarthy describes these efforts as “reflecting a growing, sober recognition that this crisis is no longer distant. It is at the door.”

Broader Regional Warning

The analyst warns that the Sahel has become a sanctuary where extremist organizations regroup, recruit, train, and launch operations southward into coastal West Africa. He notes that Benin has already suffered deadly attacks near Pendjari National Park, Côte d’Ivoire continues fortifying its northern frontier following the Grand-Bassam massacre, and Togo has seen mounting infiltration pressure.

A Lesson Learned at Enormous Cost

McCarthy draws a stark conclusion from the AES experience: no country defeats a transnational insurgency through isolationist nationalism or militarized governance alone.

“Security and development are inseparable,” he writes. “Roads, schools, healthcare, agriculture, jobs, and functioning local governance are as essential to counterterrorism as soldiers and weapons. Where states are absent, extremists fill the space.”

He urges Ghana and the wider ECOWAS community not to treat the Sahel as someone else’s problem, warning that “West Africa cannot afford to learn that lesson twice.”

Joseph McCarthy is an analyst and researcher specializing in governance, security, and political transitions in the Sahel. The views expressed in his opinion article are his own.