Create jobs to stop xenophobia: Prof

2010-07-28 20:07

Durban - The government should create more jobs, build more houses and change its foreign policy to end xenophobia, a KwaZulu-Natal academic said on Wednesday.

“There are three things that the government needs to focus on if they want to end xenophobia. It would be building houses for people, creating jobs and changing their foreign policy,” said Professor Patrick Bond of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

The government had managed to build stadiums for the 2010 World Cup and it could do the same with job creation.

“More and more refugees from Zimbabwe, Somalia and other parts of Africa are pouring into South Africa and are creating havoc in the country,” he said in a telephonic interview after the centre released a 500-page study on xenophobia over the past decade in the country.

Bond said it was difficult to say whether the xenophobic attacks that happened in 2008 would recur.

“We simply cannot say, because the sparks that create these infernos of anger are unpredictable. We do know, however, that the underlying causes have not changed since 2008, namely unemployment, housing shortages.”

Bond said there were now a million fewer jobs, many more refugees and a much higher rate of social protest in recent months.

- SAPA