Threats and deadly conflict over migration are spreading fast in South Africa. This is hugely worrying and could result in widespread injury and killings, as it has in the past.

The region’s investment prospects could be dimmed too, due to perceptions of political instability.

The need for effective responses is real and urgent. The death toll, while disputed, is rising, and reports of marches, threats, sacking of dwellings and violence are widespread across South Africa.

Anti-foreigner hysteria is being driven by online campaigns which appear to be highly organised. They include the use of faked information and graphics.

It is also being driven by campaign leaders and by politicians who support campaigns to root out foreigners, either actively or simply by justifying the arguments used by the more dangerous activists. The UN secretary general, Amnesty International and several foreign governments, including those of Mozambique, Nigeria and Ghana, have berated South Africa for not responding appropriately to anti-migrant mobilisation.

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Read more: South Africans are far less tolerant of migrants than before – hotspots, drivers and solutions

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In a televised address on Sunday 7 May 2026, the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, outlined various initiatives to lessen the conflicts over migration. But was this a coherent response, or a missed opportunity to make real progress?

The core of the response was the five-point plan agreed to by a special cabinet committee meeting last week. The points included a law enforcement crackdown (including intensifying deportations), establishing dedicated immigration courts, rooting out employment of undocumented workers, securing borders, and tackling corruption (including a reform of identity systems.)

Ramaphosa admitted that economic conditions and the poor state of many public services explained why people were desperate and that grievances, including grievances about the influx of undocumented migrants, were “real”. Some have interpreted his stance as justifying the association of foreigners with the grievances that poor South Africans have.

Based on my work as a political economist in migration governance over the past decade, I know that virtually all the specific actions mentioned in the five parts of the plan had already been announced by the South African government, though not as a concerted platform to address the current crisis. Yet implementation has been painfully slow.

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Read more: South Africa’s new immigration policy takes a digital direction – will it succeed?

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Clearly, there needs to be urgent and visible follow-through on these commitments. This should include the promise to clamp down on anti-foreigner agitators and those who have wounded or killed people they believed to be foreign. To my knowledge, very few agitators and attackers have been arrested, let alone charged. None of the leaders inciting dangerous actions have been arrested, or even called out by political leaders.

To help reduce the violence and the perception of risk, a number of additional steps need to be taken. Firstly, the forging of a collective political front of parties in the country against anti-foreigner activities. Secondly, the mobilisation of civic and religious institutions to fight against irresponsible politicking. Third, a renegotiation of colonial-era bilateral labour agreements with South Africa’s five neighbouring countries. And finally, addressing the country’s acute unemployment crisis.

Four steps that could make a difference

Firstly, the head of state – or the head of his political party – should bring together the leaders of all the significant political parties in a forum which commits to agreeing not to incite anti-foreigner sentiment, and also, as a group, condemns such behaviour.

Secondly, leaders of civic and religious institution could be encouraged to do the same – to warn against irresponsible politicking. Further than that, religious and community groupings could be encouraged and even assisted by government to drive programmes to include foreigners into the mainstream of South African society in a constructive way.

There are examples of how to do this in other parts of the world in developed and developing countries. These include South America and other African countries.

National, provincial and local governments could also drive initiatives to include foreigners into the national community. These could be standalone programmes or in cooperation with civil society institutions.

Thirdly, there should be a renegotiation of bilateral labour agreements with five neighbouring countries. In a white paper released in 2025 the government committed to establishing employment quotas for South Africans in various sectors of industry. It also committed to the renegotiation of the bilateral deals. The existing agreements are colonial in origin and form. They withhold virtually all labour and social rights from migrant labourers. And they don’t accommodate long-term labour migration contracts, now common in other parts of the world.

Such reforms could create more manageable as well as fair and equitable systems of migrant labour. South Africa could address its labour needs in a workable way. And the temptation to bypass the system should be lower, with fewer undocumented migrant workers.

It’s not realistic yet to do away with regional labour migration, but it could be far better managed.

Finally, Ramaphosa said he’d be sending out envoys “to seek to find sustainable solutions to these challenges”. But this has already been done, more than 20 years ago. South Africa and some of its neighbours agreed to a protocol on the facilitation of the movement of persons in the southern African region. This initiative was negotiated in the Southern African Development Community.

But since the protocol was signed by several heads of state in the region in 2005, there has been no progress. South Africa, its partners and the Southern African Development Community itself are guilty of negligence and should accept that they could have and can do more to avoid crises such as the present one.

Poorer South Africans are vulnerable to anti-foreigner mobilisation because of their dire economic circumstances: 32.7% unemployment; 37.8% of people classified as very poor. And public services are often very bad.

More growth and more jobs must dampen the powder-keg that is so easily sparked.

But even before that is achieved, there is a great deal that could be done to eliminate the spark itself – tensions over migration.

Alan Hirsch receives research funding from the New South Institute.

Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have discovered the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever detected, opening a new radio astronomy frontier. A hydroxyl megamaser is a natural space laser, and this one is located in a violently merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away.

We spoke to the astronomers, Thato Manamela, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pretoria, and Roger Deane, director of the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy and a professor at the universities of Cape Town and Pretoria, about their study.

What you’ve found has been described as a ‘new frontier’ in space research. Why is it extraordinary?

This discovery is extraordinary because of the record distance at which we’ve detected it, over eight billion light-years away. That places it deep into the early universe. This means that we aren’t seeing the galaxy as it exists today. We are seeing it as it was 8 billion years ago. Since the Big Bang happened about 13.8 billion years ago, we are looking at a “toddler” version of the universe. At that stage where the maser signal was transmitted by the host galaxy, galaxies were much more “chaotic”, they collided more often and were much more active than the stable, mature galaxies we see nearby today.

It gives us a rare glimpse of galaxy interactions and extreme star-forming environments when the cosmos was less than half its current age. Think of light like a letter in the mail. If a friend sends a letter from overseas, by the time you read it, the news is old. In space, light is the letter. The “news” from this galaxy took 8 billion years to reach us. We see the galaxy as a “toddler” even though, in its own time, it has already grown up or changed.

We detected this megamaser, which operates on a scale of power millions of times greater than a typical galactic maser. Both megamasers and gigamasers are cosmic radio lasers. While a megamaser is a million times more luminous than a standard maser found in the local universe, a gigamaser is a billion times more luminous, making it 1,000 times more powerful than a megamaser.

In just five hours of observing time we found a signal that typically requires hundreds of hours of observation, given its distance and rarity. But gravitational lensing boosted the signal enough to detect it. Additionally, while we were targeting neutral hydrogen, MeerKAT’s wide bandwidth enabled the surprise discovery of the megamaser signal in the same data.

This rapid detection suggests that future surveys with MeerKAT and the upcoming SKA Observatory could uncover many more such distant, extreme objects. Its ability to find this so quickly proves that we finally have the technology to see faint signals from the very distant past. It’s a preview of what the upcoming Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a unique, one-of-a-kind international mega-project, might achieve.

But a highly complementary next-generation facility called the next-generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) is being planned and designed for construction in the US. The SKA Observatory (SKA-Low and SKA-Mid) focuses on low-to-mid radio frequencies. The ngVLA will operate at much higher frequencies. Together, they will form two of the major pillars of next-generation global radio astronomy. The finding gives astronomers a new way to study how galaxies evolved in the early universe.

What technologies or capabilities made this possible?

The discovery was made possible by the sensitivity and wide frequency coverage of the MeerKAT radio telescope. Its ability to detect faint signals over a broad frequency range allows us to search for spectral lines across large cosmic volumes. A spectral line is a cosmic chemical fingerprint. Every atom or molecule emits electromagnetic waves at specific frequencies. Detecting those frequencies tells astronomers what the gas is made of.

In this case, MeerKAT’s wide bandwidth allowed us to detect both the hydroxyl line and neutral hydrogen absorption in a single observation. Previously, with older technology, this would have taken two separate observations.

Equally important are advances in data processing and computing. The data were processed using high-performance computing resources at the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA).

Processing such massive amounts of data is like trying to drink from a firehose. MeerKAT collects gigabytes of information every second, resulting in files far too large for a standard computer to handle. To find a signal from 8 billion years ago, which is millions of times fainter than a cell phone signal, we must use robust calibration pipelines. These act like an automated high-tech car wash to scrub away digital noise and sharpen the telescope’s focus. This “cleaning” process requires trillions of mathematical calculations, necessitating the use of supercomputers that work for days to transform raw radio interference into a clear scientific discovery.

Gravitational lensing also played a key role. A massive foreground object, like a star or galaxy, for example, amplified the signal from the distant galaxy, effectively acting as a natural telescope and boosting our ability to detect it.

How does what you’ve found change our understanding of the universe?

It’s rare that a single astrophysical system, a collection of celestial objects, in this case, two galaxies forming a lens system, can change our understanding of the universe. We typically need large sample sizes to do that. But the combination of the recording-breaking distance and the speed of the discovery was impressive.

It suggests that systematic searches – such as those conducted by deep MeerKAT surveys – could convert these once-rare finds into powerful probes of extreme, yet highly obscured star formation in the distant universe. As a result of this observation, the SKA Observatory and other future telescopes won’t just be looking for more of the same; they will be looking for hidden history.

Hydroxyl megamasers are usually associated with galaxy mergers. We expect some galaxy mergers to host pairs of supermassive black holes. Almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its centre. When galaxies merge, the supermassive black holes at their centres can eventually spiral towards each other, producing gravitational waves, ripples in space-time. Finding systems like this helps astronomers study an important stage in galaxy evolution and the environments where these extreme events occur.

By using megamasers to find these pairs, we can study the final stages of how the largest objects in the universe are built. This is a major milestone in a galaxy’s life. By finding these galaxies now, we are catching them at a key evolutionary stage, the final countdown before they collide and release a massive burst of energy that our next generation of detectors will be able to hear.

The strength of the MeerKAT-detected hydroxyl signal after such a short observation time therefore implies that astronomers will be able to detect large numbers of these systems across most of cosmic time.

What does the discovery say about South Africa’s place in data-intensive radio astronomy?

This discovery highlights South Africa’s leading role in radio astronomy. Facilities such as MeerKAT, combined with data-intensive platforms like IDIA, provide world-class capabilities for both observation and analysis. It also demonstrates strong local expertise in handling large, complex datasets.

Discoveries like this rely on advanced data processing, signal extraction and scientific interpretation. These are all key strengths within the South African research community. As we move from using current scout telescopes like MeerKAT to building and operating the world’s largest radio observatory, the SKAO, South Africa is well positioned to remain a hub for data-intensive astronomy. Results like this reinforce the country’s role in shaping the future of the field.

Thato Manamela works for the University of Pretoria. He receives funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF SARAO). He is affiliated with UP and IDIA.

Roger P. Deane previously held an SKA Research Chair in Radio Astronomy, funded by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is a facility of the National Research Foundation (NRF), an agency of the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI).