Anti-migrant protests in two cities in South Africa have turned violent, with the government blaming disinformation about a court ruling on asylum seekers.
Violence erupted on Thursday in Johannesburg’s Soweto township and the east coast port city of Durban, with two dozen cars set ablaze and foreign-run businesses forced to close, police said.
The unrest followed demonstrations demanding that refugee centres stop processing asylum applications.
Acting national police commissioner Lieutenant-General Puleng Dimpane on Thursday said 10 vehicles were torched in Johannesburg and 14 in Durban, where three people were arrested.
In Soweto, a Reuters reporter saw residents carrying groceries out of a shop they said was owned by a person from Somalia, whom they chased away.
Those residents fled after the police arrived.
In Durban, a Reuters reporter saw cars torched in the urban centre, where foreign-owned shops were also looted.
AFP reporters in the city said the police opened fire with rubber bullets to disperse protesters who reportedly set alight a business run by foreigners.
The protesters are opposed to a July Constitutional Court decision that removes procedural barriers to seeking asylum, including for people who entered South Africa irregularly, lacked asylum transit visas or missed reporting deadlines.
On Thursday, the government’s inter-ministerial committee on migration held an urgent briefing to address overcrowding at asylum offices after implementing the ruling.
A day prior, the committee said all its offices were overwhelmed by the number of incoming applications. Government spokesperson William Baloyi said the violence was triggered by people spreading deliberately false information about the constitutional court ruling.
Baloyi said the court decision had been widely misrepresented, and that it did not automatically grant refugee status, permanent residence or other legal rights to undocumented migrants. — Wires
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Africa set to launch own credit agency in bid for cheaper borrowing
Africa will launch its own credit rating agency on Wednesday aimed at countering what many see as unfair assessments by global institutions that make it more expensive for African nations to borrow money.
The Africa Credit Ratings Agency (AfCRA), backed by the African Union after nearly a decade of talks, will judge the creditworthiness of countries, businesses and institutions.
The Indian Ocean island of Mauritius was chosen as the agency’s home, partly due to its established financial services industry.
It aims to offer an alternative viewpoint to the “big three” global credit ratings — Fitch, Moody’s and S&P — which have been accused in the past of unfairly playing down African economies.
The African Peer Review Mechanism, the institution behind AfCRA, says 23 countries on the continent are not rated at all by the traditional agencies.
They can also overlook Africa’s huge informal sectors, which do not easily show up in official data, analysts say.
“Africa is not asking for favourable ratings,” Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu wrote on X last month, welcoming AfCRA.
“We are asking for fair ratings, grounded in our fundamentals and in the reforms our economies are actually carrying out.”
Low credit ratings have real-world effects as investors charge more interest to lend money.
On average, it cost Africa US$9 for every US$100 borrowed in international markets in 2024, compared to about US$4,70 for emerging markets in Asia and US$6,50 in Latin America, according to estimates by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of mostly rich nations.
AfCRA is not just a response to “Africa’s unhappiness with the incumbent players”, Hannah Wanjie Ryder, chief executive officer of consultancy Development Reimagined, told a recent seminar organised by the Chatham House think tank.
“The theory of change is they would actually be able to look with clearer eyes,” she said.
It remains to be seen whether AfCRA will be able to persuade investors that its ratings can be trusted over those of the leading agencies.
AfCRA’s founders say there will be no government interference.
Analysts say the first test is whether the agency will downgrade an African government. If not, investors risk seeing it as the continent marking its own homework.
Investors will base their decisions on the rating, he added, if “it is credible, not because it is African”. — Wires
