The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has called for an emergency meeting of African trade union centres under the African Regional Organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC-Africa) and the Organisation of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU) to draft joint mechanisms for protecting migrant workers across borders.

Describing xenophobia as a cancer that will metastasise across the continent if not excised in South Africa, the NLC said it was already showing its pustules elsewhere, including other countries of Africa.

NLC President, Joe Ajaero, in a letter to the President of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), in Johannesburg, South Africa, urged the sister labour unions to lend their powerful voices without equivocation and condemn the xenophobic attacks in its strongest terms, not as a mere press release but as a mass mobilisation.

The NLC President demanded that COSATU use its immense weight to pressure the South African government to take robust and immediate steps.

It called for the immediate prosecution of perpetrators and compensation for families who have lost their loved ones, as well as workers who have lost their livelihoods.

Noting that the passivity of the security forces in the face of the attacks amounts to complicity, the NLC called for the full deployment of state resources to protect migrant workers and their property.

Ajaero said the lethargy the labour centre has witnessed speaks of acquiescence, which is deeply worrying to all who believe in the sanctity of working-class life.

He said the NLC writes with the urgent alarm of a fellow labour centre that is watching with horror as the ghosts of nativism and xenophobia once again stalk the streets of South Africa.

“We are compelled by the blood of our fellow black workers, Zimbabwean, Malawian, Mozambican, Somali, Nigerian, and others, who are being murdered, not for any crime, but for the sin of being African in Africa. We are appalled at the destruction of the livelihoods of Africans built through years of sweat and blood in the streets of South African towns,” he said.

He called on COSATU to also lead a mass educational and sensitisation offensive within every union, community, and workplace in South Africa.

“We must teach that the migrant worker is not a cause of poverty but a victim of the same system. We must break, once and for all, the racist myth that a fellow black African from across a colonial border is our enemy.

“Xenophobia is not good for anybody, especially the world of work, because it fractures working-class unity and weakens our collective bargaining power against capital. We must organise a pushback against this latest eruption and change the mindset that propels it before it destroys our collective unity across the continent,” he said.