South Africans are not lazy, they face a broken economic system

Princess Phumzile Buthelezi, the chairperson of the IFP Women's Brigade Image: Inkatha Freedom Party The remarks by Princess Phumzile Buthelezi, chairperson of the Inkatha Freedom Party Women's Brigade, that South Africans are lazy compared with foreign nationals cannot go unchallenged. She made the comments while addressing thousands of IFP supporters in Durban recently. A little reading might have revealed how intellectually flawed and disingenuous this argument is. Describing South Africans as 'lazy' in the context of growing anti-immigrant sentiment ignores the systemic consequences of apartheid, exploits a painful historical stereotype and misrepresents the economic realities facing the black majority. The stereotype also masks the structural barriers that leave millions of workers facing an exhausting and expensive daily struggle simply to access the labour market. The claim of 'laziness' completely ignores the physical legacy of apartheid spatial planning, which deliberately separated the black majority from centres of economic opportunity. Black South Africans were systematically forced into townships and homelands far from city centres, industrial areas and economic hubs. Decades after apartheid, these patterns remain deeply entrenched. Many working-class South Africans travel enormous distances to get to work, with some waking as early as 3am or 4am. They depend on expensive, fragmented and sometimes unsafe public and informal transport networks, including minibus taxis. For many households, transport consumes a significant portion of their income. Calling people 'lazy' when they endure gruelling daily commutes to low-wage jobs is not only unfair but ignores the realities of their lives. The 'lazy native' myth is also deeply rooted in South Africa's colonial and apartheid history. White minority governments and employers historically portrayed black South Africans as unwilling to work as a means of justifying forced labour, low wages, pass laws and other forms of economic and social control. By portraying the oppressed as inherently unwilling to work, the system avoided responsibility for deliberately unequal access to quality education, economic opportunities and resources. It is therefore deeply disappointing that such rhetoric should resurface in contemporary political discourse, particularly from a party with such a long history in KwaZulu-Natal. Populist narratives often suggest that undocumented migrants are employed because they 'work harder', while South Africans are supposedly too lazy or entitled to accept low-paying jobs. This conveniently ignores another side of the story: some employers may prefer undocumented workers precisely because their vulnerable legal status makes them easier to exploit, including through below-minimum wages and violations of labour laws. Princess Buthelezi is entitled to her political opinions. But those opinions should not come at the expense of historical fact or the dignity of millions of South Africans who work hard under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.| MDUDUZI ZULU Durban