Vusi Thembekwayo and the dog whistles of a spotted hyena — by Kelechi Deca

Tellingly, Vusi Thembekwayo is liked across Africa, especially amongst young entrepreneurs who throng to his podcasts, and page like Roman plebeians earnestly anticipating to hear from Julius Caesar.

I also like his confidence, carriage, and the way he pushes that certitude a bit unwieldy whenever he has his audience by the jugular.

But as our ancestors said, ” there are times to show reverence to the king, and if the king starts acting in ways that disrobe his royalty, ordinary people would cover their faces with baskets to tell him the truth.”

Unfortunately, the seasonal madness led by the children and grandchildren of the Inkatha Freedom Fighters has disambiguated Vusi Thembekwayo stripping him of all pretenses and leaving him very human like all of us, encumbered by the Sisyphean weight of ethnic and racist biases.

On May 1, as a guest speaker at The Platform, he told everyone who cares to listen that “South Africans are not xenophobic,” dismissing reports circulating across media platforms all over the continent as an “agenda to divide us.”

And I fell for that, after all, that is Vusi Thembekwayo who has been going around the world projecting and positively promoting Africa.

Ordinarily, his clarion call for unity has no sign of veiled hypocrisy as this is Vusi we are talking about. One of Africa’s most vocal promoter to integration, but to those gifted with the ability to lip-read his words against his body language, Thembekwayo’s rhetoric is a masterclass in gaslighting.

While working hard to present his compatriots as victims of the circumstances, he surreptitiously absolved them, and the South African government for failing to rein in the “Jecintaic Mob” by validating the grievances of xenophobes back home.

Unlike the EFF leader Julius Malema who has remained consistent in acknowledging the challenges of unbridled immigration, and failure at documentation by the Home Office while unequivocally condemning the violence African immigrants are subjected to.

Vusi Thembekwayo subtly towed a position that is dangerous because it is duplicitous.

He openly denied the existence of systemic xenophobia to a Nigerian audience, but at home, he told a different story. In one of his videos I watched few days ago, he highlighted how certain areas in South Africa have been turned into urban jungle because of African immigrants.

He specifically mentioned areas such as Kempton Park which he pointed out as having been “overrun” by foreigners, lamenting that many South African neighborhoods no longer look like what they used to be when he was growing up.

Interestingly, most of the South Africans on his page hurled all sorts of invectives on Nigeria, and Nigerians which in my estimation achieved that which he set out to achieve.

For someone with his level of exposure and knowledge, is he ignorant of the fact that some municipal governments in many parts of the world deploy ‘targeted neglects’ as policy instruments against areas inhabited by immigrants, as a form of anti immigration policy implementation.

A man given to sophistry, he is grounded in the dark art of audience compartmentalization. To his audience in Nigeria and other African countries, he presents a symbol of African unity, calling for peace, love and understanding.

But to his Inkhata Freedom Fighters mob at home, he echoes the populist trope that immigrants are the problem of South Africa, stealing opportunities, jobs, and even eroding their values and redrawing the landscape.

Lending a voice that has garnered respect and integrity internationally to the mobbism under the tutelage of Jecinta Zuma legitimizes the actions of the anarchists who go about beating, maiming, and looting shops belonging to African immigrants as the South African Police act like spectators in the Rugby match.

Most disheartening is the scene where a Ghanaian national was being mauled by South African as if he was a thief caught in the act. A development that forced the Ghanian government to evacuate its citizens.

That very disturbing picture that is reminiscent of Groblersdal case when a White farmer and his son set their ferocious Boerbells dogs on a 30-year-old farm security officer, Veneruru Kavari.

Being a deft player in communications manipulation, Thembekwayo conveniently shifts the goalposts away from the state’s accountability, failing to hold the government accountable for both inability to sanitise the country’s immigration system, failure to keep the environments tidy, and also for their gross irresponsibility in looking the other way while violence reigns supreme across the country.

For someone who pretends to be a bridge builder across the continent, his statements fall short of masking his bias against immigrants, a prerogative I do not begrudge him of.

As I have said since the start of the Season 5 of this madness in South Africa, every country has the right to decide who resides within its borders. But this must be according to its own laid down laws and regulations. And every immigrant living there legally is entitled to human dignity.

Outsourcing the authority to police its streets to headless mobs, many of whom are seemingly inebriated and uncontrollable is the highest form of state irresponsibility.

A point that is clearly lost to people like Vusi Thembekwayo who has been ostriching from holding the government accountable for its inability to manage its borders, keep the environment clean, or provide jobs.

Hiding behind his index finger to make comments that provides the ideological fuel for the fire, even as he pretends to hold a water bucket has not been effective for someone of his size and physical built.

I am not shocked by his ideological reubenism, he once expressed admiration for the ruthlessness of the apartheid police. Being just a child during apartheid, he can be forgiven.