Photo credit: EWN
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has vowed there will be arrests for those who instigated unrest over the presence of undocumented migrants in the country.
Eyewitness News reports that Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema on Tuesday told Ramaphosa that the failure to bring those responsible to book gives the impression that the violence was state-sanctioned.
Answering questions in the National Assembly on Tuesday, Ramaphosa could not offer a timeline for arrests, as Malema challenged that many of those behind the campaign are already well-known.
Ramaphosa said authorities are not ruling out that outside forces may have played a role in fuelling the anti-immigrant uprising.
He claimed countries whose nationals have been impacted by the mass repatriations tend to agree.
“Those we perceive to be outsiders who want to disturb the stability in South Africa by getting South Africans to seem to be at war with Africans from other nations.”
But Malema was unhappy with the pace of the clampdown on those driving the Afro-phobic sentiment and demanded arrests and prosecutions.
“What is worse, two of them came to meet with you. You should have locked them up the day when they came to meet you!”
Ramaphosa said the migration issue is sensitive and complex, and South Africa is being closely watched as to how it responds.
