Zuma backs March and March to keep marching as MK denies its own statements

Jacob Zuma met leaders of the March and March Movement ahead of Election Day and told the protest movement to keep going, saying it should not be rattled by criticism from outside.

Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, who leads the movement, introduced Zuma at the gathering. His message to those in the room was blunt. “Do not concern yourselves with what other people say,” he told them.

The meeting put the MK Party president alongside the leadership of a movement that has built its public standing on the demand that undocumented foreign nationals be dealt with, and it came days before voters go to the polls. As Briefly News reported on 4 November, Zuma used the platform to push back against what the party calls deliberate distortions of its position on illegal immigration, and to question where statements circulated about the party and the movement had actually come from.

Zuma said the party had never issued those statements directly. According to his account, they came “from other people” rather than from inside the MK Party.

The party did not leave the meeting to Zuma’s remarks alone. It issued a formal written statement that acknowledged the work the March and March Movement has done on undocumented immigration and confirmed that mutual respect exists between the two. The statement restated the party’s position that undocumented foreign nationals must either regularise their stay in South Africa or return to their countries of origin.

That is the enforcement position the movement has been pressing in public, and the MK Party has now put it in writing alongside an acknowledgement of the movement’s work.

The same statement drew a line. It called for the dignity and human rights of all people to be respected through the process, and it warned that enforcing immigration laws must never become an excuse for discrimination or violence. The party’s point is that the enforcement demand stands on its own and does not license anyone to take the law into their own hands.

For South Africans following this argument, the meeting matters for two reasons. The first is the endorsement. A movement that began on the street has now been received by the leader of a party contesting the election, and its work on undocumented immigration has been recognised in the party’s own written record. The second is the question the meeting leaves open. Zuma says the statements attributed to the MK Party on this subject did not come from the party, which means the public has been reading claims about the party’s position that the party itself rejects.

The gathering drew attention online, and the reactions were split. Some commenters read the timing as calculation rather than conviction. One wrote that it was “a very calculated move”, another that it was a “last-minute desperate campaign stunt”, and a third that the movement’s leader was being used as a face for the campaign. Others took the opposite view. “Yes we are going to vote for those who have been on our side regarding this issue of illegal immigration,” one commenter wrote. These are individual posts on a public platform and not a measure of the country.

The meeting also follows a pattern in Zuma’s recent public activity. Briefly News reported earlier that he reached out to Ngizwe Mchunu after two rondavels at Mchunu’s family home in Mbumbulu, KwaZulu-Natal, were allegedly set alight by unknown men, and that Mchunu linked the arson to his work protesting against illegal immigration. Zuma has also criticised what he described as foreigners overstepping boundaries in the country, and remarked on the coronation of the Igbo King in the Eastern Cape, which he linked to protests in KuGompo City.

What the meeting did not produce is a dated commitment on enforcement, a named list of what the MK Party would change if elected, or an answer to the question the movement’s supporters keep asking, which is what happens to people who neither regularise their stay nor leave. The party’s statement sets out the principle. The machinery is not in it.

The Enquirer will keep reporting the enforcement question as it is put to parties contesting this election, and will put the same question to the other parties in the field.