President Jacob Zuma is under pressure to fix the current menace of xenophobia.

The violence is believed to be the work of named controversial opposition figures in that nation seeking to dislodge Zuma in the event of a national security failure. The Zimbabwean Community in South Africa chairman, Mr Ngqabutho Mabhena, told reporters there was a third force behind the attacks and accused some opposition parties of trying to destabilise the neighbouring country under the ANC-led government.

PDZ party leader Barbara Nyagomo blasted Zuma saying, “As an organisation’s condemn forthrightly the emerging xenophobic upheavals in South Africa and view this a violation of people rights enshrined in the South African Constitution and other instruments that South Africa has ratified. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa states in it’s preamble that ‘ South Africa belongs to all those who live in it,” Violence targeted at foreign nationals is also a violation of the right to, dignity and equality enshrined in the Constitution. We call upon  the government of South Africa and it’s organs to take stringent measures to quell the situation and ensure that normalcy is restored immediately. Illegal foreigners must be dealt with through the statutory defined processes by the right state organs. The government can not allow such criminal acts to unfold unabated. The rule of law must be restored immediately.”

Jacob Zuma has been trapped at the teeth by right wing extremists on the subject of immigration. Last week Zuma, struggling to fix the problem, was cornered during a press interview ending up contradicting himself.

He said, “well, firstly that is a debatable point whether South Africans are xenophobic.  I don’t think we have those numbers of foreigners. And I don’t think you would sit for years and years without any burst out, if South Africans were xenophobic, in the majority of cases only when there are such incidents where people take the law into their own hands. And generally people who take the law into their hands because they don’t have places to stay etcetera, and also the kind of employment they have, if for an example, you look at how it has been done in other areas where they open a lot of businesses, it becomes so obvious that the numbers are too big; and with time, people begin to feel what is this;

you will recall an incident in Soweto they were having shops, nobody ever thought the foreigners have got shops here until a young man was trying to steal and a foreigner shot him and that became a problem, so you can see what is it that makes the kind of situation get out of hand; I feel the numbers of foreigners in South Africa are far more than the numbers Europe is fighting…”