Immediate Release
3 July 2026
As multiple protests and volatile anti-illegal immigrant demonstrations continue to escalate across South Africa, civil action group DearSA warns that treating this crisis as purely a street-level conflict misses the root cause. The organisation is calling for an immediate, drastic shift in narrative away from raw emotion and toward systemic accountability, targeting both the ground-level corruption at our border posts and the broader institutional failures of the government.
Recent demonstrations have seen an alarming rise in undercurrents of intimidation, with peaceful protests increasingly marred by the presence of weapons, sticks, and sjamboks. This growing volatility is being heavily fuelled by political opportunism ahead of upcoming elections, leaving the country exposed to a highly fractured, emotional cycle of violence.
“The fundamental flaw driving the chaos on our streets is a total data black hole created by state neglect,” says Chloe Castle, CEO of DearSA. “South Africans are being told we host millions of foreign nationals, yet the government possesses no accurate, transparent statistics to differentiate between documented and undocumented individuals. You cannot manage or fix a system when leadership fails to maintain basic data. This administrative vacuum has created a space currently filled by lawlessness and political exploitation.”
DearSA highlights that while mainstream media and political rhetoric focus on high-level marches and on clashes with migrant communities, the two most critical links in the chain remain untouched: the broader government leadership and ground-level border control.
“Lawlessness at our borders is a direct symptom of administrative failure at the top and corruption at the gates,” Castle continued. “We are calling for a dual layer of accountability. The broader government must answer for the policy collapse, lack of infrastructure, and data deficits they have allowed to persist. Simultaneously, ground-level border control structures must be rooted of the bribery and corruption that compromises our national security daily. We need to take the weak links out of the chain and hold the broken leadership accountable. Marches will not secure this country, but fixing the system will.”
South Africans are not inherently xenophobic, but civil society is reacting to a system that has utterly failed them. Decades ago, South Africa successfully established structured programmes, such as the historical Zimbabwean refugee framework, proving that regional socio-economic responsibilities can be managed effectively when a functional system exists. The current collapse of these protocols means the problem has been entirely self-created by institutional failure.
DearSA’s “Fix the System” campaign aims to redirect public frustration into structured, lawful, and factual civic action. The organisation is currently preparing formal requests under the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) to demand complete transparency regarding border corruption statistics, disciplinary actions against border officials, and official tracking metrics from the Department of Home Affairs.
DearSA urges all South Africans, civil organisations, and political parties to reject emotional incitement and violence. True safety, sovereignty, and regional cooperation can only be restored through data-driven, structured public participation that forces government institutions to enforce the rule of law from the executive level down to the border gates.
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Media Enquiries:
Anneke Burns
DearSA Public Relations
071 423 0079
anneke@abpr.co.za
About DearSA:
Influence government policy before implementation Dear South Africa is a legally recognised and constitutionally protected non-profit platform which enables the public to co-shape all government policies, amendments and proposals. We’ve run many successful campaigns and have amassed a considerably large active participant network of over 1 million individuals across the country and beyond.