Historians and journalists have a common but often unspoken weakness: they tend to focus on giants. Their attention is mostly on presidents, generals, billionaires, revolutionaries, and celebrities. By concentrating on those already in the spotlight, they often overlook the smaller figures quietly developing on the edges of public life.
Medicine provides a helpful analogy. Doctors don’t spend their time discussing every tiny organism. Most viruses are overlooked because they seem insignificant. They go unnoticed until they start to spread. Only when they affect a larger population do they become a serious concern. By that point, they are no longer just interesting — they are dangerous.
This, I believe, is the proper way for serious observers to examine the phenomenon called Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma.
Before moving forward, let’s clarify an important point. Despite sharing the surname, Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma is not, based on publicly available information, related to former South African President Jacob Zuma. Outside South Africa, many people assume a family link upon seeing the name, but no such connection is known. The similarity extends only to the surname. Nonetheless, names are significant. Visibility and perception are also important, and in our age, perception frequently matters more than reality.
For those unfamiliar with her, Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma is a broadcaster-turned-activist who has become one of the most visible public figures in South Africa’s increasingly vocal anti-immigration movement. Through public campaigns, protests, interviews, and social media engagement, she has built a profile around the claim that foreign nationals are a principal cause of many of South Africa’s economic and social difficulties.
We need to be clear. She speaks to frustrations that are undeniably real. She speaks to citizens who feel excluded from prosperity. She speaks to communities that feel neglected. She speaks to people who feel abandoned by political elites. That is precisely why she deserves attention. Not because she is a great thinker. Not because she is an accomplished scholar. Not because she has offered groundbreaking economic solutions. Not because she has advanced a compelling theory of development. Rather, she deserves attention because she represents a growing political tendency that thrives in periods of uncertainty and decline.
Indeed, Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma matters less as an individual than as a symptom. She is not the disease itself but one of its most visible manifestations.
We live in an age when attention has become a form of political capital. Previous generations generally became visible because they had achieved something worthy of public notice. Today, many achieve visibility itself and present it as an accomplishment.
The result is a peculiar inversion of values. Fame becomes evidence of expertise. Recognition becomes proof of wisdom. Visibility becomes a substitute for substance. The loud are mistaken for the wise. The provocative are mistaken for the profound.
The consequence is that people with little understanding of history, economics, sociology, diplomacy, or governance can still command enormous public attention. One need not master a subject. One merely needs to master the algorithm.
The tragedy is that South Africa’s challenges, like those of many countries, are too serious to be entrusted to slogans. The country faces profound economic and social difficulties. Unemployment remains devastatingly high. Economic inequality remains among the worst in the world.
Many young people see little prospect of upward mobility. Public confidence in institutions has eroded. Infrastructure is under strain. Public services often fall short of expectations. These are not imaginary grievances. They are real. Anyone who ignores them is either dangerously detached from reality or maliciously dishonest.
If a young South African sees foreigners running businesses while he remains unemployed, his frustration is understandable. If a struggling family feels excluded from economic opportunities, their concerns deserve respect. If communities feel abandoned by those who govern them, they deserve answers. Understanding these frustrations is not difficult. What is difficult is to refuse to exploit them.
That is where the difference between leadership and opportunism lies. The existence of suffering does not automatically validate every explanation offered for it. History teaches precisely the opposite. Again and again, societies facing hardship have been presented with simple explanations for complex problems.
The formula is ancient, and the sequence is predictable. Identify genuine pain. Attach it to an inaccurate diagnosis. Offer a convenient scapegoat. Convert frustration into hostility. Present hostility as a solution. The pattern repeats throughout history with remarkable consistency. Foreigners become the problem. Minorities become the problem. Migrants become the problem. Outsiders become the problem. The real causes remain conveniently untouched.
This is where the politics represented by figures such as Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma become especially troubling.
South Africa’s economic problems are fundamentally structural, spanning education, governance, productivity, investment, infrastructure, institutional quality, and corruption. These issues stem from the legacy of historical injustices and ongoing policy failures. Political Economy teaches us that genuine prosperity depends on well-functioning institutions, productive investment, innovation, entrepreneurship, skills development, and social stability. History insists that communities under stress tend to target visible groups to project their collective anxieties. Sociology warns that societies that fall into this pattern rarely address their core issues effectively. None of these disciplines supports the proposition that national renewal can be achieved through hostility towards migrants. Indeed, the proposition collapses under even minimal scrutiny.
Would South Africa’s electricity crisis disappear if every foreign national left tomorrow? Would corruption vanish? Would state capacity suddenly improve? Would economic growth automatically accelerate? Would public schools immediately become world-class? Would unemployment disappear? These questions answer themselves.
What concerns me most, however, is not merely the weakness of the analysis. It is the poverty of the imagination behind it. Africa has produced political giants, visionaries, and leaders whose horizons extended beyond borders. When Nelson Mandela emerged from prison, he did not invite South Africans to define themselves by resentment of outsiders. He invited them to build a nation. When Kwame Nkrumah spoke of Africa, he imagined a continent where its people would rise together rather than retreat into narrower identities. When Julius Nyerere articulated his vision of African humanism, he spoke of shared dignity and collective responsibility. When Thabo Mbeki declared “I am an African,” he offered one of the most powerful affirmations of continental identity in modern political history.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with these figures on particular policies, one cannot deny the scale of their vision. They thought in centuries. They thought in civilisations. They thought in terms of what Africa might become. By contrast, contemporary nativist politics often appears trapped within the narrow confines of immediate grievance.
The difference is not merely political. It is intellectual. One tradition asks how societies can expand opportunity. The other asks who to blame for its absence. One seeks solutions. The other seeks targets. One builds. The other points fingers. That is why the issue extends far beyond Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma herself. Individuals come and go. The deeper problem is the style of politics she represents. It is a worldview that rewards outrage over understanding. A mindset that confuses attention with significance. A civic culture that mistakes performance for leadership. A politics that substitutes accusation for analysis. And perhaps most dangerously, a politics that encourages citizens to direct their anger towards people who are often almost as vulnerable as themselves.
The migrant trader did not design failed public policies. The refugee did not create corruption. The foreign worker did not engineer institutional collapse. Yet they become convenient symbols, as symbols are easier to attack than systems. The tragedy is that while citizens are encouraged to focus on these targets, the larger structures responsible for exclusion remain insufficiently challenged. This is not resistance. It is a diversion. This is not courage. It is mere convenience. This is not patriotism. It is a counterfeit version of patriotism that reduces love of country to hostility towards others.
Real patriotism demands more. It demands confronting difficult truths. It demands challenging incompetence wherever it exists. It demands holding leaders accountable. It demands building institutions rather than inventing enemies. And it demands intellectual honesty, even when it is unpopular. This is why those with clarity of mind and courage of voice must refuse to remain silent about the virus in their world. Academics must speak. Journalists must speak. Business leaders must speak. Community leaders must speak. Students must speak. Writers must speak. Citizens must speak. Not because one activist represents an existential threat. She does not. But bad ideas gain power when sensible people treat them as harmless.
Every generation faces moments when it must choose whether to challenge fashionable falsehoods or accommodate them. This is one such moment. The future of South Africa or Britain will not be secured by those who identify new groups to resent. It will be secured by those who create new opportunities for citizens to prosper. It will not be secured by slogans. It will be secured by competence. It will not be secured by scapegoating. It will be secured by real reforms, not slogans designed to bait and defraud. And it will not be secured by political viruses that feed on public frustration while offering no genuine cure.
Viruses thrive by exploiting weakness. They spread through confusion. They flourish when truth grows timid. The phenomenon known as Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma should therefore concern us not because it is unique, but because it is increasingly familiar. Across continents, societies are producing similar figures. Different names. Different accents. The same formula. Simple answers to complex questions. Visible enemies for invisible problems. Attention in place of insight. Outrage in place of thought. The challenge before South Africa — and indeed before all societies facing similar temptations — is whether enough people still have the intellectual confidence to reject the easy lie and embrace the difficult truth.
History suggests that nations are rarely destroyed by bad ideas alone. They are weakened when too many good people decide that confronting bad ideas is someone else’s responsibility. The time to speak is before the epidemic becomes a pandemic. The time to stand up and be counted is now.
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Anthony Kila is a Jean Monnet professor of Strategy and Development. He is currently Institute Director at the Commonwealth Institute of Advanced and Professional Studies, CIAPS, Lagos, Nigeria. He is a regular commentator on the BBC and he works with various organisations on International Development projects across Europe, Africa and the USA. He tweets @anthonykila, and can be reached at anthonykila@ciaps.org
The South African virus called Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma