South Africa's One-Way Ledger

On June 12, South Africa's Department of International Relations and Cooperation announced it would begin billing foreign governments for the cost of arresting, housing, and deporting their nationals.

Moving forward, we will also be billing countries for their foreign nationals who have to be deported or who are in our criminal detention facilities and have to be deported back into their countries. — Department of International Relations and Cooperation

On July 4, Minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni told Nigeria the other half of the arrangement.

So there’s no compensation that will come from government. — Khumbudzo Ntshavheni

The two decisions were separate policy acts, not a coordinated design. Together they form a one-directional financial valve: South Africa charges its neighbors for removing their citizens, and refuses to pay for the damage those citizens suffered from violence South Africa failed to prevent. The billing policy did not emerge from a vacuum. It was announced alongside a 46 percent increase in deportations over two years and the creation of immigration courts to expedite expulsions.

Our ongoing orderly and lawful deportations and repatriations, which have increased by 46% over the past two years, is clear evidence of this. — Leon Amos Schreiber

By mid-July, the government had deployed a multi-agency framework that functioned as a conveyor belt: the Border Management Authority identifies migrants, Home Affairs verifies their status, the police detain them, the Justice department provides legal oversight, and the international relations department coordinates with origin countries. ^[1] Priority courts were established in Durban specifically to fast-track the deportation of Malawian nationals. ^[2] Over 53,000 foreign nationals were repatriated in five weeks, with Malawians accounting for more than 80 percent of those processed, and Zimbabwean returnees were issued five-year re-entry bans at Beitbridge — the system not only removed people; it barred their return. ^[3] Ramaphosa had framed the violence as a migration enforcement problem from the first day of the crisis, attributing tensions to illegal immigrants straining public utilities and jobs even while condemning vigilantism. ^[4] The enforcement measures that followed — the courts, the bans, the billing — tracked that framing. By late April, a deputy minister had already accepted a formal memorandum of demands from anti-immigrant protesters at the Union Buildings, including calls for a migrant audit and mass deportations. ^[5] The billing policy, announced seven weeks into the violence, was not a pre-existing administrative practice. ^[6][4] What South Africa refused to pay is the other column. Ntshavheni's rejection of Nigerian compensation claims came with a rhetorical twist: she challenged Nigeria to provide information on drug dens, shifting blame from South Africa's failure to protect foreign nationals to alleged criminality by the victims. ^[7] South Africa also blocked Ghana's petition for an African Union debate on the xenophobic attacks at the Mid-Year Summit, with Minister Ronald Lamola insisting South Africa would continue to lead with a Pan-African heart while rejecting continental oversight. ^[8]

South Africa will continue to lead with a Pan-African heart. — Ronald Lamola

The AU condemned the killings in the strongest terms but accepted South Africa's framing of migration as a broad continental issue rather than a stand-alone agenda item — condemning the symptoms while blocking any mechanism to hold South Africa specifically accountable. ^[9] The result is that Nigeria, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Ghana bear three separate costs. First, their own charter-flight evacuations: Nigeria funded repatriation via Air Peace, Uganda via Uganda Airlines, each bearing the full expense of emergency extraction of citizens fleeing violence South Africa failed to prevent. ^[10] Second, South Africa's deportation charges — the billing policy directed at the same governments whose citizens are fleeing. Third, the uncompensated losses of their citizens: Nigeria is now systematically collecting data to quantify property losses for reparation claims, with a minister stating the government wants to proceed on the basis of data and the quantum of losses. ^[11]

We want to proceed on the basis of data and the quantum of losses they have suffered before tabling our claims. — Sola Enikanolaiye

It is a mirror of South Africa's own cost-quantification approach — but directed at South Africa as the debtor. The ledger is not entirely one-sided. South Africa has absorbed its own costs: R600 million allocated to police, the operating expenses of the Temporary Repatriation Processing Centre in Musina that processed over 20,000 people, cancelled artist gigs across the continent, and Botswana's electricity cutoff to several South African provinces. ^[12][13][8] Ireland, for its part, deported 42 South African nationals via charter flight at a cost of €735,000 to the Irish state without billing South Africa — a reminder that governments routinely absorb deportation costs as a sovereign function. ^[14] But South Africa's self-inflicted costs come from violence it failed to prevent, not from any duty to compensate the victims. The asymmetry holds: the neighbors pay for South Africa's enforcement, and South Africa pays nothing for the harm done under its jurisdiction. By late July, over 160,000 foreign nationals had fled South Africa in two months. ^[15] Minister Kubayi announced the government was scaling down temporary measures, citing high costs — the same financial pressure that had been the stated motivation for the billing policy. ^[3][1] The regional backlash extended beyond diplomacy: Ghana cancelled Ramaphosa's planned August visit, Nigeria's president refused to meet a South African delegation, and Nigerian lawmakers demanded revocation of licenses for South African companies like MTN and MultiChoice. ^[16] Throughout the crisis, Ramaphosa invoked the historical debt South Africa owes to nations like Nigeria — which provided an estimated $60 billion in anti-apartheid support. ^[17]