South Africa’s ruling African National Congress has submitted a formal continental migration compact to the African Union, proposing to redistribute the operational burden of cross-border movement across member states rather than allowing it to concentrate in individual countries. The proposal rests on five implementation pillars covering legal alignment, institutional machinery, financing, structural drivers and official discourse, and it asks the AU Commission to produce a draft compact within 18 months.
The submission arrives after months of escalating anti-immigrant violence inside South Africa that triggered diplomatic tensions with neighboring states and forced urgent intervention by the country’s political leadership. In June, anti-immigrant groups organized a nationwide shutdown demanding the departure of undocumented foreign nationals, a deadline the government rejected as unlawful. Police and private security were deployed to prevent the kind of widespread unrest that erupted in July 2021 and cost the economy an estimated R50 billion. President Cyril Ramaphosa met with traditional leaders in the days before the planned protest, seeking their help in de-escalating tensions after weeks of attacks, deaths and displacement of foreign nationals.
The Thabo Mbeki Foundation had warned in a June discussion document that Afrophobia threatens the ANC’s continental standing, given that the party’s liberation history was built on solidarity from African states that sheltered and supported the movement during apartheid. The foundation linked the present crisis to a longer decline it traces to the party’s 2007 Polokwane conference, cautioning that weakening continental ties would leave the ANC isolated from the alliances that sustained its political rise.
The first operational pillar targets legal gaps in the continental architecture. Its central ask is bringing the AU’s 2018 Free Movement Protocol into force, a protocol that currently holds just four ratifications against the 15 required. South Africa has never signed it. The pillar also urges member states to accede to the 1990 Migrant Workers Convention, which South Africa and 35 other AU members have not ratified, and to fully ratify the Kampala Convention on internally displaced persons. Each of these instruments has been available for years. None is in force.
The second pillar proposes new institutional machinery. An African Refugee Responsibility Allocation Mechanism would distribute asylum claims across the states migrants pass through, rather than concentrating them in whichever country migrants ultimately reach. A companion continental migration data platform would standardize how AU members track cross-border movement, creating shared visibility into migration flows where fragmented national systems now exist.
Financing is the third pillar. The proposal calls for a continental migration and refugee fund with contributions scaled to national income. It also includes a cost-recovery mechanism allowing South Africa to partially recoup the estimated R4 billion a year it spends incarcerating foreign nationals. Correctional Services data cited in the document shows 25,447 foreign nationals were held in South African prisons since January 2025, most on immigration offences rather than violent crime.
The fourth and fifth pillars address underlying drivers and official language. One commits AU members to faster rollout of the African Continental Free Trade Area, coordinated peace operations in conflict zones including the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sahel, and climate adaptation funding for regions such as the Horn of Africa. The other commits states to rejecting xenophobic language from officials and developing a shared continental vocabulary for discussing migration.
The ANC framed the proposal in terms of partnership rather than grievance. “The Republic has hosted, and continues to host, substantial migrant populations from across the continent,” the ANC document states. “South Africa has provided, and continues to provide, basic education to migrant children, primary health care to migrant patients, emergency treatment to all who present at its facilities, employment opportunities under the lawful immigration framework, social-grant access to recognised refugees and the constitutional protections of one of the most generous constitutional dispensations on the continent.”
By contrast, the AU has not formally responded to the cycles of violence inside South Africa. The ANC has asked the AU Assembly to place the compact on its agenda at the mid-year coordination meeting and at its next ordinary session. None of the substantive commitments, ratifying the free movement protocol, establishing the refugee allocation mechanism, setting up the continental fund, can advance without action by individual member states and the AU’s own institutions. Whether the AU Commission will treat the 18-month drafting deadline as a firm delivery target or a soft aspiration remains the open question at the center of the entire initiative.