WeeklySA_AdminDYING DREAM: Operation Dudula is not an aberration, but a symptom of the cry against Southern African leaders’ impunity, theft and cowardice of South African politicians, according to writer…
By Themba Khumalo
One does rather despair, doesn’t one? To stand witness to the slow, deliberate unravelling of what was once hailed as a miracle — a triumph of the human spirit. The grand, audacious experiment of post-apartheid South Africa, once a beacon of hope to the world, now appears hell-bent on immolating itself upon the altar of its own disillusionment.
It is a ghastly spectacle — like watching a magnificent creature, once radiant and alive, now convulsing in its death throes, lungs rattling with a particularly nasty infection of the soul. And if one listens closely, beyond the political bluster and hollow pronouncements, one hears an unsettling truth: South Africa is coughing up its own democracy.
And what a sound it makes! What a thoroughly unedifying, utterly terrifying symphony of self-destruction accompanies this national expectoration. It is the rasping, violent wheeze of Operation Dudula — a guttural, desperate gasp that, with a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, mistakes hatred for healing and chaos for order.
This is no mere symptom, you understand. It is the venom itself — erupting from the national gullet, rancid and furious — a rejection not just of progress, but of the painstaking, often messy, yet utterly essential labour of building a real democracy.
A contagion of fear masquerading as patriotism
This is not patriotism; it is pyromania. The movement’s flames do not cleanse — they consume. What burns in its fire are not criminal syndicates or drug cartels, but migrants, refugees, and the fragile remnants of human solidarity. Dudula thrives in the ruins of governance, where hunger has replaced hope, and disillusionment has replaced democracy.
South Africa’s post-apartheid dream — of equality, justice, and dignity — now smoulders beneath the debris of its own neglect. The government, paralysed by corruption and factional warfare, has abdicated its basic duties: to feed, to protect, to employ, to educate. In the vacuum left behind, vigilantes step forward, claiming the authority that the state abandoned.
Dudula is one such manifestation — not a movement of principle, but a weaponised frustration. Its violence is not random; it is systemic. It targets those with the least power to fight back — Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Malawians — the invisible workforce that props up the informal economy, cleans the homes and raises the children of the middle class. It punches down because punching up has become impossible.
The regional rot that feeds the flame
Yet to understand Operation Dudula is to look beyond South Africa’s borders. The fire did not start here; it spread here. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) — once touted as a bulwark of regional democracy — has become little more than a gentleman’s club of presidents-for-life. It shields the powerful, sanctifies repression, and normalises decay.
Nowhere is this betrayal more catastrophic than in Zimbabwe. Under Emmerson Mnangagwa’s iron-fisted rule, the state has institutionalised fear. Protests are crushed with paramilitary efficiency. Opposition leaders vanish into the labyrinth of the carceral state. Journalists and activists are detained, harassed, and silenced. The economy — once the breadbasket of the region — now resembles a famine of its own making, crippled by hyperinflation and corruption.
For millions of Zimbabweans, migration is not a choice; it is a survival instinct. They cross the Limpopo with little more than their names, chased not by ambition but by necessity. They walk for days through heat and hostility, hunted by hunger and border patrols alike. Their crime is not criminality, but desperation — a human consequence of political failure.
Eswatini, too, bleeds under a monarchy that fires live rounds into unarmed crowds. Mozambique’s government responds to dissent with brutality; its security forces break bones faster than they repair roads. In Malawi and Lesotho, corruption festers, disasters are mismanaged, and those who speak truth to power are harassed into silence.
The SADC, meanwhile, issues statements. It expresses “concern”. It calls for “dialogue”. And then it retreats into its habitual inertia — a diplomacy of indifference that allows tyranny to fester and citizens to flee.
The failure of post-liberation leadership
Post-liberation states across Southern Africa have perfected a tragic alchemy: they have turned victory into vanity and struggle into stagnation. Their ruling parties, once symbols of liberation, have become patrons of patronage and prisons of progress.
South Africa, for its part, wears the veneer of constitutional democracy but lives the reality of managed decay. The promises of 1994 — of jobs, homes, dignity — lie in the rubble of corruption and incompetence. Unemployment festers above 30 per cent. Inequality has deepened into a hereditary condition. The public health system is gasping; schools are overcrowded and under-resourced. Millions queue for electricity and water that never arrive.
And in this rot, Operation Dudula finds its oxygen.
The state’s paralysis has normalised mob justice. Chauvinistic patriotism has become policy by omission. Every uncollected rubbish heap, every unlit street, every dry tap becomes a breeding ground for resentment. Dudula gives this resentment a language — crude, vengeful, and tragically persuasive. It promises protection while delivering persecution.
Scapegoating the symptom, not the cause
Every Zimbabwean crossing the border is a mirror held up to regional leadership — a reminder of the failure to govern, to build, to care. But rather than confronting that reflection, Dudula smashes the mirror and calls it patriotism.
In the townships and informal settlements of major cities, migrants live in limbo — legal or not, always disposable. They work jobs that South Africans will not take, endure conditions that the law will not regulate, and still are accused of theft, of disease, of invasion.
Dudula’s rhetoric is simple and seductive: “Take back what’s ours.” Yet what has been taken from South Africans is not by migrants but by the ruling and moneyed class — through looting, neglect, and the calculated betrayal of public trust.
It is easier, of course, to attack the powerless than to confront power. It is safer to raid a shack than to challenge a minister. Dudula’s moral theatre thrives on this inversion — cruelty masquerading as courage, prejudice dressed as principle.
A fever born of cowardice
Operation Dudula is not an aberration; it is a symptom. It is what happens when the immune system of democracy collapses. It exposes the rot — the impunity of SADC leaders, the theft and cowardice of South African politicians, the erosion of public conscience.
This is the political equivalent of a fever: the body’s desperate attempt to fight infection by burning itself alive. Dudula burns because the infection — corruption, inequality, moral inertia — runs unchecked. And as with all fevers, it will not break until the underlying disease is treated.
But the disease is not migration. It is leadership without integrity. It is regional complicity in oppression. It is the hollowing out of governance until only violence fills the void.
A region on the brink
If Southern Africa continues to confuse repression for stability, fear for unity, and scapegoating for justice, then the fever will climb. It will spread across borders and classes — an epidemic of despair mistaken for patriotism.
South Africa cannot afford to indulge this delirium. Its liberation movement once inspired the world; now, its silence shames it. Its leaders once spoke of justice; now, they mumble of “foreign interference” as if poverty were an import. The region cannot continue to flee from its failures and call it immigration control.
The real crisis is not the border. It is what drives people to cross it.
Operation Dudula is not the people’s shield. It is their seizure — a paroxysm of a democracy in distress. It burns because the infection has reached the bloodstream of the state. Until South Africa — and the region it anchors — confronts its own failures with the courage it demands of others, the mob will continue to rise.
And when the mob becomes the voice of the nation, the silence of leadership becomes complicity.
Because when conscience dies in the palace, cruelty marches in the street. And in that mirror, the whole region sees itself — rotting, blind, and unashamed.
• Khumalo is an independent columnist and a former newspaper editor.
