South Africa Is Playing With Fire
Boardrooms are now battlegrounds. Activists are marching into corporate offices across South Africa demanding that "foreigners" pack up and leave.
President Cyril Ramaphosa
@CyrilRamaphosa this cannot stand and here's why it's not just wrong, it's dangerously short-sighted. Please ask yourself does South Africa know how deeply it is embedded in the rest of this continent?
✅️1. MTN carries hundreds of millions of subscribers across Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, Côte d'Ivoire, and beyond a South African company thriving on African soil that isn't its own.
@MTNza
✅️2. Absa now earns nearly a third of its group profit from outside South Africa — Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania and is still acquiring more African banks as we speak.
@Absa
✅️3.Standard Bank remains the continent's largest bank by assets, moving trillions of rand through African economies every single year.
@StandardBankZA
✅️4. MultiChoice/DStv has for decades been the dominant gatekeeper of entertainment and information across dozens of African households.
✅️5. Sanlam and Old Mutual manage insurance and pension savings for millions of East and West Africans.
✅️6. Nandos, Steers, and Debonairs feed households across Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and Uganda.
✅️7. Bidvest and Imperial Logistics run supply chains that keep goods moving through multiple African economies.
✅8. ️Then there's tourism an industry South Africa depends on heavily, and where the hypocrisy cuts sharpest. Hospitality groups like Tsogo Sun, City Lodge, and Sun International have expanded into Zambia, Nigeria, and beyond. South African Airways, Airlink, and a web of SA-based travel companies have spent decades marketing Cape Town, Kruger, and the Garden Route to the rest of the continent and Africans have answered in huge numbers. Kenyans, Nigerians, Ghanaians, and others fill Sandton hotels, Table Mountain cable cars, and Kruger safari lodges every year, injecting real foreign currency into the South African economy.
So which is it? Do you want African wallets in your tills and African bodies in your hotel beds, but not African faces in your boardrooms?
Now imagine just for a moment Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, or Ghana adopting the same logic. Boardrooms in Lagos or Nairobi staging walk-ins demanding MTN executives leave, Absa hand back its banking licenses, or Kenyan immigration quietly discouraging South African tourists from checking into Mombasa or Diani hotels. The fallout for South Africa would be instant and brutal and tourism, banking, and telecoms would be the first casualties, not the last.
This is the essence of glass houses and stones. You cannot build a continental empire in banking, telecoms, insurance, and tourism, and then slam the door on that same continent's citizens the moment it's convenient at home. It's worth remembering South Africa's most celebrated exports thrive precisely because other nations didn't gatekeep opportunity by passport.
Trevor Noah built a global career from a studio in New York. Elon Musk, born in Pretoria, built his fortune in Silicon Valley and Texas. Both benefited from economies that judged them on merit, not nationality.
@Trevornoah @elonmusk
If Africa responds to South Africa's boardroom nativism with mirrored nativism, no one wins least of all South Africans working, investing, and building across this continent.
Mr. President, this is a fire worth putting out before it spreads.
As always, I choose to remain an optimist.
Mohammed Hersi
A true African patriot at heart
