As Mthwakazi leader Mqondisi Moyo urges Zimbabweans to prepare, the government that took Israel to The Hague must prove that it can prevent threatened violence against Africans on its own streets.

On June 18, Mthwakazi Republic Party President Mqondisi Moyo issued a warning to Zimbabweans living in South Africa: remain calm, avoid demonstrations and likely confrontation points, keep identification documents accessible, preserve electronic copies of important records and establish communication plans with family, employers, churches and community organizations.

“Preparation is not panic, and prudence is not provocation,” Moyo said. “Every Zimbabwean should act responsibly, remain peaceful and protect life.”

His statement recognizes South Africa’s sovereign right to administer its borders and enforce its immigration laws. It also states the constitutional boundary that matters: those powers belong to lawful public authorities, independent courts and established procedures. They do not belong to mobs, vigilante groups or private political movements.

June 30 is not an official South African government deadline. A fraudulent notice using the government’s coat of arms attempted to give the date official authority, but the government confirmed that it was false. The ultimatum is nevertheless real in a more dangerous sense. Anti-immigration groups have repeatedly invoked June 30 as the day by which undocumented foreigners must leave “or else,” while videos have shown men marching with sticks, clubs and whips.

The date has acquired enough organizing power that, on June 17, South Africa’s four major labor federations urged workers not to participate in anti-migrant protests. A legally meaningless deadline that requires a nationwide warning from organized labor is no longer merely an internet rumor.

The violence has not waited for the deadline. Migrants have reported looted businesses, burned homes, forced displacement and failures of police protection. Mozambique reported that five of its nationals were killed in violence in Mossel Bay. On June 17, police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades near a Durban site where thousands of mainly Malawian migrants had gathered while waiting to return home.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has declared that responsibility for enforcing immigration law “rests with the state and the state alone”. He said private citizens may not stop people in the streets and demand proof of nationality, and promised action against those inciting lawlessness and violence.

He is correct. His statement also defines the test: will the state actually exercise the authority that he says belongs exclusively to it?

A government does not prove that it controls a country by announcing that it should.

The word that matters is “successfully”

Max Weber did not formulate the modern expression “failed state.” He supplied the definition from which much of the later literature developed. A modern state, Weber wrote, is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a defined territory.

“Successfully” is the load-bearing word.

A government may possess a constitution, a flag, ministries, diplomats and a seat at the United Nations. But when mobs decide who may remain in a neighborhood, who may operate a shop, who may enter a clinic and who must produce identity papers in the street, formal sovereignty becomes progressively fictional.

Robert Rotberg describes failing states as countries convulsed by internal violence whose governments can no longer provide essential political goods to their inhabitants. Security is the first of those goods. The concept is not binary. Authority can disappear locally, institution by institution and function by function, while the national government continues holding elections and sending ambassadors abroad.

South Africa is not a failed state in every institution or throughout its territory. It has competitive elections, working courts, a free press, universities, banks and a capable central bank. But state failure is already visible in particular places and functions. Wherever organized private actors determine who may remain, trade, travel or receive public services—and the authorities cannot reliably stop them or protect their victims—the state has surrendered part of its governing function.

As I argued in The Apartheid State Is Failing, state failure is not a switch. It arrives unevenly, one institution and one community at a time. For the migrant hiding in the mountains, “failing” and “failed” are the same word.

The South African government’s own expert panel on the July 2021 unrest identified the weakness and hollowing out of state institutions, rampant corruption and ignored intelligence warnings. When violence began, the situation deteriorated so badly that the military had to be deployed. Five years later, the government has again received advance notice of threatened disorder. It cannot claim surprise.

South Africans who can afford protection have already drawn their own conclusions about state capacity. More than 600,000 active private security officers operate alongside approximately 184,000 police personnel. Private guards outnumber police by more than three to one. One of the most basic public goods has become a private commodity.

African governments are evacuating their citizens

Other African governments are not waiting for Pretoria to restore confidence.

Ghana began repatriating its citizens in late May. Approximately 300 departed on the first flight, and by June 11 roughly 1,000 had returned. Nigeria then flew home 262 citizens, while more than 1,000 registered for voluntary return. Nigeria’s foreign minister described them as imperiled citizens who considered their lives endangered by remaining in South Africa.

Malawi and Mozambique have also organized returns. Ghana summoned South Africa’s representative and requested that the African Union debate attacks on African nationals. These governments are treating parts of South Africa not merely as politically uncomfortable, but as sufficiently dangerous to justify removing their people.

That is an extraordinary judgment on a country that presents itself as Africa’s moral leader. South Africa spent decades receiving political, diplomatic and material solidarity from the continent. Africans supported South Africans when apartheid made them victims. The ANC now governs a country from which African governments are evacuating black citizens for fear of violence by other Africans.

For Zimbabweans from Mthwakazi, the danger is doubled. Many were driven south by political repression, economic destruction and the hollowing out of Zimbabwean institutions. They now face exclusion in the country to which they fled and persecution in the country they left.

Moyo’s statement gives that condition its most precise sentence: “A people pushed out of one state and unsafe in another has nowhere to stand.”

His answer is not ethnic reversal. The MRP pledges a non-racial, multiethnic constitutional democracy, with equal protection regardless of language, ancestry, religion or political allegiance—including for Shona-speaking residents. A movement that knows the cost of exclusion says it will not reproduce it.

The state that prosecutes Israel before the world

South Africa has invested enormous diplomatic prestige in falsely accusing Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice. Israel rejects the accusation and maintains that its military campaign followed Hamas’s October 7 massacre and hostage-taking.

Whatever one believes about the Gaza war, a government that demands universal scrutiny abroad must accept universal scrutiny at home.

Israel’s conduct has generated emergency United Nations sessions, international litigation, diplomatic ruptures, boycotts and demonstrations across continents. Around 100,000 people marched through The Hague in one protest, and 149 states supported a United Nations General Assembly resolution demanding a Gaza ceasefire.

The visible response to Africans being attacked and displaced in South Africa has been overwhelmingly regional: evacuation flights, diplomatic protests and a proposed African Union discussion. There are no worldwide university encampments for Mozambicans driven from their homes. There are no crowds of 100,000 marching through European capitals for Ghanaians whose businesses were looted. There is no emergency global campaign demanding that South Africa protect Malawians waiting in fear to leave.

The situations are not identical in scale, law or circumstance. They are not. The comparison concerns moral reflexes. Outrage is most valuable before threatened violence becomes mass killing. Yet the disparity suggests that the identity of the alleged perpetrator helps determine which suffering becomes a global cause.

South Africa cannot demand that international judges scrutinize Israel while asking the world not to examine what is happening on its own streets. It cannot claim guardianship of international human rights while neighboring governments remove frightened citizens from its territory. It cannot invoke African solidarity while Africans sleep outside government buildings because they are afraid to return home.

South Africa’s failure will not remain in South Africa

Robert King has warned that South Africa’s deterioration would not remain a domestic event. The country still functions as a regional economic anchor. Its infrastructure and comparatively large economy draw migrants southward from poorer and less stable states. If South Africa becomes poorer, more violent and more hostile to migrants, those pressures will not disappear. They will be redirected northward toward Europe and elsewhere in the West.

A serious breakdown would destabilize neighboring economies, regional trade and migration patterns across the continent. A country of South Africa’s size cannot fail quietly.

Moyo asks the world to watch

Moyo’s request to the international community is deliberately limited. He is not asking for foreign troops, foreign administration or another aid-dependent political structure. He asks governments and diplomatic missions to observe the period around June 30 and report what they see; to defend the access and safety of journalists and human-rights monitors; to preserve and, where legal thresholds are met, use existing accountability mechanisms; and to support an African Union discussion of attacks upon African nationals.

None of those steps requires recognition of Mthwakazi, military intervention or new money. Observation is not interference when threatened disorder has been publicly advertised. It is a precaution against abuse and a deterrent to those who believe nobody is watching.

Pretoria still has time to act. It can protect vulnerable communities before crowds assemble. It can arrest those who commit or credibly incite violence. It can enforce immigration law through police, courts and authorized officials rather than allowing private movements to impose collective punishment. It can make clear that nationality, accent or appearance will not determine who receives the protection of the law.

Or it can deliver another speech.

“We ask the world not to look away,” Moyo said.

On June 30, the world should watch whether South Africa’s constitutional government—or private coercion—governs its streets.

Can the South African state protect human beings inside South Africa?

If it cannot—or will not—it has failed at the first duty of a state.

The apartheid state is failing. June 30 may show the world how far.