Who pays when Pakistanis flee South Africa?

Geerard Adriaen 

South Africa may feel far away from Pakistan. Yet, it is not. Around 200,000 Pakistanis live in the country, most of them working in small businesses. For many people in Pakistan, South Africa is not simply a country where a relative happens to live. It is where fathers, brothers and sons have built businesses and earn the money on which families back in Pakistan depend. In fiscal year 2026, Pakistan received $290.7 million in workers' remittances from South Africa, far from an insignificant amount. That is why what has been happening there should concern Islamabad.

Xenophobia has been building in South Africa for years, aimed at African and Asian migrants who are blamed for the country's high unemployment, rising crime and strain on public services. The hatred has periodically boiled over into mobs targeting migrant-owned businesses and businesses that employ them. This year it reached a new pitch. In May, the anti-immigrant groups March and March and Operation Dudula demanded that all "illegal foreigners" leave the country by 30 June. Fayyaz Khan, who heads the Pakistan-South Africa Association, deemed it impossible to repatriate all Pakistani nationals by that date. Only roughly 25,000 African and Asian migrants, illegal and legal alike, fled abroad within weeks of the ultimatum.

When the deadline passed, some 120 anti-migrant protests erupted on 30 June, several turning violent. Migrants were driven from homes and shops; premises were looted, some burned. Both undocumented and documented migrants were targeted, including Pakistanis. Protests have continued until today and more than 178,000 African migrants have fled the country. No official figure exists for how many Pakistanis have left.

Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, the leader of March and March, has named Pakistanis and Somalis specifically, claiming they have become "first rank citizens" while South Africans are reduced to "second rank citizens" in their own country. She has also accused them of hiring "protection-fee mafias" to kill South African protesters – a claim which fact-checkers in South Africa have flagged as unsupported. What should worry Islamabad most is that Pakistanis aren't just swept up in generalised anti-foreigner rhetoric – it's one of the handful of nationalities Ngobese-Zuma focusses on.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has condemned the violence, apologised to its victims and called for perpetrators to face justice. Those words are welcome. But governments are not judged only by their statements; they are judged by whether the people under their jurisdiction are actually protected. On that measure, South Africa continues to fail.

Nigeria has already drawn the obvious conclusion. After more than 600 of its citizens fled, Abuja began compiling claims for abandoned businesses and property, intending to use them as the basis for compensation talks with Pretoria. South Africa's foreign ministry initially suggested claims would be assessed case by case. Then Minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni outright rejected the idea of compensating Nigerians. It escalated into a genuine diplomatic row.

Nigeria has not yet secured any compensation, but it has asked the right question: who pays when people are forced to abandon their livelihoods abroad, because the host country failed to protect them? Ghana has since followed in Nigeria's footsteps. After evacuating over a thousand of its own citizens, Accra too pledged to pursue compensation for what they left behind.

Islamabad should follow Abuja and Accra. That means, first, giving Pakistanis who lost property or businesses a formal channel to register their losses – through the High Commission in Pretoria, if nowhere else. It means, second, demanding that South Africa establish a real mechanism to investigate these losses and compensate for them.

Pakistan has other, larger crises competing for its foreign ministry's attention. But $290 million in annual remittances and 200,000 citizens whose livelihoods are now openly named as a target is not a footnote. It is a constituency, and it is owed an answer.