The scenes unfolding across parts of South Africa—where anti-immigration protests have intensified and thousands of foreign nationals, including Zimbabweans, are returning home—are exposing more than a border management challenge. They are laying bare the economic interdependence that has tied Zimbabwe’s labour market to its southern neighbour for more than three decades.
For Buy Zimbabwe Chairman Munyaradzi Hwengwere, the current tensions should not be viewed primarily through the lens of migration or xenophobia. Rather, they reflect a deeper structural imbalance: an economy that imports too much, produces too little, and consequently exports both jobs and people.
Speaking to Great Dyke News, Hwengwere argued that Zimbabwe’s heavy reliance on imported goods has steadily weakened domestic manufacturing, limiting employment opportunities and compelling many Zimbabweans to seek livelihoods in South Africa.
The numbers illustrate how profoundly migration has reshaped the regional labour market.
According to South Africa’s Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke, only about 80,000 Zimbabweans lived in South Africa in 1996, accounting for around 10 percent of the country’s foreign-born population. By 2001, that figure had doubled to 161,000 as Zimbabwe’s economic crisis deepened.
The acceleration that followed was dramatic. By 2010, Zimbabweans had become South Africa’s largest foreign-born community, numbering approximately 818,900, or more than 43 percent of all foreign nationals. South Africa’s 2022 Census estimates that nearly 1.16 million Zimbabweans now live in the country, representing almost half of South Africa’s 2.4 million foreign nationals.
Those figures reflect one of Africa’s largest modern labour migrations, driven by widening economic divergence between the two neighbouring economies.
South Africa remains the continent’s most industrialised economy, yet growth has slowed markedly over the past decade. Persistent unemployment—officially above 30 percent—combined with sluggish investment and weak job creation has heightened competition for employment, particularly in lower-skilled sectors where migrants are heavily represented.
That economic pressure has increasingly spilled into politics, with immigration becoming a focal point of public frustration even as economists argue that structural weaknesses in the South African economy, rather than migration alone, explain much of the country’s unemployment challenge.
For Zimbabwe, Hwengwere says the lesson is different.
Rather than viewing migration simply as a labour issue, he believes policymakers and consumers should see it as the downstream consequence of domestic production choices. Every imported product that could be manufactured locally represents employment opportunities foregone, industrial capacity left idle and consumer spending transferred outside the country.
The argument aligns with broader industrial policy goals pursued by many developing economies. Countries that have successfully expanded manufacturing—from Vietnam to Ethiopia’s emerging industrial parks—have generally relied on strengthening domestic production while selectively integrating into global supply chains rather than depending predominantly on imports.
Zimbabwe’s own industrial policy similarly identifies import substitution and value addition as central pillars of economic transformation. Yet manufacturers continue to cite high production costs, electricity shortages, limited access to affordable finance and competition from cheaper imports as persistent constraints.
As thousands of Zimbabweans begin returning from South Africa, the debate is shifting from managing migration to creating the conditions that reduce the need for it in the first place.
