In Durban, an open field at Sherwood Park has filled with people. Thousands of migrants, many of them Malawian, have left homes, jobs, and shops to sleep outdoors through the South African winter while they wait for buses home. They fled communities where they no longer felt safe, amid reports of attacks, displacement, and deaths. Their governments are now coming to collect them. Zimbabwe, Malawi, Ghana, and Nigeria have all started moving citizens back across the border.
That’s the human cost of South Africa’s latest xenophobia wave. There’s a second story unfolding far from the camp, in boardrooms and parliaments, and at its centre sits a telecom company that did nothing to start any of it.
A Crisis With a June 30 Deadline
The current flashpoint is a date. An anti-immigration group called March and March gave undocumented migrants until June 30 to leave South Africa, and as that deadline nears, vigilante actions have spread. Reports say the group has begun targeting even migrants who hold valid permits. South Africa’s own business establishment is alarmed. Two of its largest advocacy bodies, Business Unity South Africa and Business Leadership South Africa, warned on June 5 that hostility toward foreign nationals damages the country’s own economy, and called for calm and African solutions grounded in the rule of law.
The Retaliation Lever Just Moved to the National Assembly
The anger hasn’t stayed inside South Africa. In Accra, protesters marched on MTN Ghana’s headquarters on June 11. In Nigeria, the outrage has turned into a policy debate. Back in May, Senator Adams Oshiomhole called for the government to nationalise MTN Nigeria and revoke MultiChoice’s DStv licence, and the suggestion alone rattled MTN Nigeria’s share price on the exchange.
This week the stakes sharpened. On June 17, Foreign Affairs Minister Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu said the executive is still working through diplomatic channels, but that any actual retaliation falls to the National Assembly to decide. That’s the same chamber where the nationalisation idea started. The lever now sits with the people most willing to pull it.
MTN’s Money Is in Lagos, Not Johannesburg
Here’s what makes MTN the obvious target, and why it’s stranger than it looks. MTN is headquartered in Johannesburg, so it reads as a South African company. Its balance sheet tells a different story. Earlier this year, Nigeria became MTN’s single biggest profit driver. The group’s chief executive, Ralph Mupita, said this week that MTN earns most of its money outside South Africa and has so far recorded no direct hit to operations, though it’s watching Nigeria and Ghana closely.
So when a Nigerian senator proposes seizing MTN as payback for events in Johannesburg, the target isn’t really a South African asset. It’s a company whose subscribers, revenue, and growth are mostly Nigerian.
Integration Was the Strength. Now It’s the Exposure.
This is the contradiction MTN can’t get out of. It spent two decades becoming the most pan-African company on the continent, living proof that a business could start in one African country and come to belong to all of them. It employs 15,000 people across 74 nationalities. It’s the closest thing the continent has to a mascot for the cross-border integration that the African Continental Free Trade Area is supposed to deliver. And that exact integration is now its weak point. When you operate everywhere, a political fire anywhere can reach you.
Mupita has been making the case against retaliation in interviews and on LinkedIn, arguing that boycotting pan-African firms costs African jobs and investment more than it costs South Africa. He isn’t wrong. He also isn’t a neutral party. The company with the most to lose from a boycott is the one making the loudest argument against one.
Why Hitting MTN Hits Nigeria Too
The history is why he’s worried. In 2019, during an earlier xenophobia wave, Nigerians shut down MTN and Shoprite outlets across several cities, and stores were looted and forced to close. MTN’s Nigerian offices were targeted as far back as 2015. Each time South Africa convulses, the bill tends to arrive at MTN’s door in Lagos.
So the retaliation being debated in Abuja carries a quiet irony. Nationalising MTN Nigeria or boycotting its services would bruise South Africa’s most visible corporate export. It would also disrupt a network millions of Nigerians depend on daily, put Nigerian jobs at risk, and unsettle the same investors Nigeria has spent years trying to court. The lawmakers reaching for MTN as a weapon would be aiming at a target that’s mostly their own.
That’s the catch in building a continent’s most integrated company. When the continent turns on itself, there’s no clean way to strike one country without hitting everyone wired into it.
