ZAMBIA 🇿🇲 IS CONTRIBUTING TO THE ALLEGED XENOPHOBIA IN SOUTH AFRICA 🇿🇦
Zambia’s Porous Borders is a Regional Crisis We Cannot Ignore. Zambian borders are porous. Most illegal migrants without passports heading south through Africa pass through Zambia aided by an entire network of facilitators.
YupWe have seen it on the news repeatedly. Ethiopians and Somalis arrested while trying to reach South Africa 🇿🇦.
The evidence is there and is mounting.
• In 2016, 19 Ethiopians suffocated in a truck while being trafficked through Zambia toward South Africa
• A few months ago, 25 suspected Ethiopian migrants were found dead in a mass grave
• 89 Ethiopians were discovered hidden inside a fuel tanker, also heading south
All these cases point to the same route, the same destination and the same complicity in between. This is not just tragic. It is a symptom of something that is much large. These migrants move in their thousands, undocumented, unverified. Nobody knows their backgrounds. They could be pastors. They could have criminal records. There is no way to know.
Their home country has failed them, yet the way they are moving risks destabilizing another. While South Africa 🇿🇦 works to clean up its own systems, its neighbors are, whether by negligence or complicity, providing easy passage for illegal migration. The deaths and arrests we hear about are not the full picture. They are the visible fraction of something far bigger. If these are the ones who got caught, imagine how many have passed through freely.
Zambia needs to be proactive in fighting illegal migration. The failure of one country in the region becomes the failure of all of us. We can do better. Let’s hold onto our humanity, but let’s also insist on the rule of law.
