DIEPSLOOT. President Jacob Zuma says crime, not xenophobia, is behind any attacks on foreigners. Relieved foreigners say they are delighted with the discovery, adding that being set on fire by thieves is “much nicer” than being set on fire by xenophobes. Meanwhile the Presidency has warned against xenophobic rumour-mongering, saying that “foreigners are dirty liars”.
Hundreds of Zimbabweans were recently seen queueing at the Limpopo border-crossing trying to return to their country of origin, while many Somali shopkeepers have locked up their stores in anticipation of more xenophobic attacks.
However, this morning President Zuma urged foreigners to stop being “hysterical girls” and overreacting whenever someone tried to set them on fire.
He added that all alleged attacks were still rumours, and that if anyone had been set on fire, it had been “imaginary fire” started with “fictional matches” and kept aflame with “a rumour of petrol”.
“South Africans do not hate foreigners,” said Presidency spokesman Herenvolk Mpshe. “We love them. We love their lounge suites, their cars, the titles deeds to their spaza jobs…”
However, he added, the public need to realise that foreigners are genetically inclined towards being “dirty liars” prone to “hysterical outbursts of delusional paranoia”.
“We respect them as human beings, obviously, but let’s just be clear that there are human beings and then there are human beings.”
The news came as a tremendous relief to Zimbabwean car-guard Scapegoat Mawhiri, who was beaten up by a mob on the weekend.
“Now that I know that they were just criminals and not xenophobes my ruptured eye-ball feels much better,” he said.
“When they come for me again on Friday night I will greet them with a cheery ‘Hello Africa, tell me how you doin’!’ and then reflect on the wonders of ubuntu while they stand on my head and carry off my chest-freezer.”
Meanwhile the South African Students Congress (SASCO) has reiterated its claim that alleged xenophobic violence is a capitalist plot.
According to SASCO deputy commissar Lobotomi Phosa, his three years in Grade 11 and seven years in Second Year Politics had given him time to sniff out various capitalist plots, including a diabolical plan to cut off his student funding if he failed to complete his Social Science degree in under 25 years.
Asked why capitalists would want almost free African labour to flee the country while simultaneously frightening off foreign direct investment, Phosa warned journalists not to confuse him with facts.
“As SASCO we might not know what the inside of a classroom looks like,” he said, “but we do know the inner workings of the capitalist mind.”
He said that a sixth-year medical student on the SASCO Politburo had confirmed that the human brain was situated just left of the pancreas, and that the brains of capitalists were “green and shriveled, like the skin of demon-goblins,” which he studied in undergraduate Microbiology.
