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The Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC) has called for an emergency continental response to the xenophobic violence sweeping through South Africa, demanding that African trade unions unite behind a joint protection framework for migrant workers and that South Africa’s most powerful labor federation stop issuing press releases and start mobilizing its membership.
NLC President Joe Ajaero sent a letter directly to the leadership of the Congress of South African Trade Unions in Johannesburg, calling on COSATU to use its institutional weight to pressure the South African government into immediate and robust action — including the prosecution of perpetrators, compensation for families of those killed and full deployment of state resources to protect migrant workers and their property. The letter pulled no punches on the security forces, whose measured response to the attacks Ajaero characterized as something beyond negligence. “The passivity of the security forces in the face of the attacks amounts to complicity,” he wrote.
Ajaero also called for an emergency meeting of African trade union centers under both the African Regional Organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation — ITUC-Africa — and the Organisation of African Trade Union Unity, to draft joint cross-border mechanisms for protecting migrant workers across the continent. The NLC’s position is that the crisis in South Africa is not a South African problem. It is an African problem with an African trajectory, and the continent’s labor movement needs to treat it as such before it spreads further.
The language Ajaero deployed was deliberately visceral. “We write with the urgent alarm of a fellow labour centre that is watching with horror as the ghosts of nativism and xenophobia once again stalk the streets of South Africa,” the NLC president said. “We are compelled by the blood of our fellow black workers — Zimbabwean, Malawian, Mozambican, Somali, Nigerian, and others — who are being murdered, not for any crime, but for the sin of being African in Africa.”
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The NLC described xenophobia as “a cancer that will metastasise across the continent if not excised,” arguing that the violence in South Africa’s cities was already showing what it called its “pustules” in other parts of Africa — a warning that the nativist logic driving attacks on foreign nationals in Pretoria and Johannesburg does not respect national borders and will not contain itself to one country if left unchallenged.
Ajaero’s demand of COSATU went beyond condemnation. He called specifically for mass mobilization rather than statement-making, urging the federation to lead “a mass educational and sensitisation offensive within every union, community, and workplace in South Africa.” The target of that offensive, as the NLC framed it, is the foundational myth driving the violence — the idea that migrant workers are responsible for unemployment, poverty and crime rather than being victims of the same economic system that squeezes South African workers.
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“We must teach that the migrant worker is not a cause of poverty but a victim of the same system. We must break, once and for all, the racist myth that a fellow black African from across a colonial border is our enemy,” Ajaero wrote.
The labor dimension of the NLC’s intervention adds a structural argument to what has largely been framed as a humanitarian and diplomatic crisis. The congress argued that xenophobia is economically self-defeating for the working class because it fractures labor solidarity and weakens collective bargaining power against employers. A workforce divided along national lines is a workforce that capital can play against itself. “Xenophobia is not good for anybody, especially the world of work, because it fractures working-class unity and weakens our collective bargaining power against capital,” Ajaero said.
The violence has already cost two Nigerian lives — Amaramiro Emmanuel, who died from injuries allegedly sustained after being beaten by South African National Defence Force personnel, and Ekpenyong Andrew, whose body was recovered at the Pretoria Central Mortuary. Hundreds of Nigerian businesses have been shuttered. The Nigerian Consulate in Johannesburg has launched a free repatriation flight program for nationals who wish to leave permanently. President Tinubu has ordered a crisis notification unit established to track developments.
COSATU commands significant institutional weight in South Africa’s political economy, with historical ties to the ruling African National Congress that give it leverage no foreign government statement can match.
