DIGITAL POLITICS OP-ED: ActionSA takes the anti-foreigner slogan to the ballot box

Two weeks before the 4 November local elections, the anti-foreigner movement’s agenda moved into party campaigning. ActionSA put “South Africans first” at the centre of its manifesto and became the main target of its rivals as a water crisis hit Tshwane, the city it governs. The anti-foreigner movement still led the conversation, but its share shrank as the well-oiled online machine of the EFF surged after a relatively subdued period recently.

Between Friday, 16 October and Thursday, 22 October 2026, Murmur Intelligence tracked political conversation across X, popular public Facebook pages and online news. On X, about 610,000 posts related directly to South African parties, institutions and politicians – either authored by them, mentions of them or reposts of them – down from about 920,000 last week.

The anti-foreigner movement: still first, but smaller

Two anti-immigration communities produced 31% of all posts on X from 18% of accounts, down from 43% last week. They benefit from notable levels of focused amplification, centred on Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma and the Put South Africans First account, including small groups whose reposts clustered in time more than chance would predict; however, it is not possible to say from this analysis whether that is due to fan, activist or otherwise inauthentically, possibly paid, coordinated behaviour.

Looking at the narratives that energised the anti-foreigner community this past week gives insight into how this political bloc’s worldview is constructed one co-opted, reframed argument and event at a time:

The state as oppressor narrative: Ngobese-Zuma’s most-shared post likened the government’s treatment of anti-immigration activists to apartheid, and anger at the court ruling on asylum seekers ran all week.

No respect for traditional, local authorities: Foreign traders took Limpopo’s Kgoshi Letsiri Phaahla to court for barring them from running tuck shops on his land, which the movement cast as foreigners defying traditional authority.

The Constitution protects foreigners over citizens: A court fight by Somali traders over street trading in Bellville, Cape Town, became evidence, for activists, that the Constitution protects foreigners ahead of citizens.

The state works for foreigners before citizens: After arrests of Home Affairs officials for selling documents, Ngobese-Zuma demanded that the buyers be arrested and their papers revoked.

Border camps and the Refugee Convention: Former Public Protector and current MK party member Busisiwe Mkhwebane has found a new life as an anti-immigrant campaigner. She campaigned for asylum processing camps at the borders and a petition to leave the 1951 Refugee Convention circulated, while March and March took its fight over asylum rules to court.

Anti-immigrant voices are under attack (and media complicity): The shooting of five March and March members at a protest in Dunoon became a rallying point, with activists complaining that the media ignored it.

Foreigners are the source of crime: Law-and-order accounts circulated the death of a crime intelligence officer allegedly run over by a Pakistani driver in Lichtenburg, and claims that state agencies had smuggled a terrorist into the country.

The movement’s critics pushed back. Pan-African commentators shared footage of anti-immigrant protesters whipping a man they took for a foreigner, who was reportedly left in intensive care.

The EFF’s best week

The EFF Supporters community more than doubled its share of voice, to 19% of posts from 10% of accounts, pushing #VoteEFF2026 and #VictoryOrDeath behind Julius Malema’s door-to-door campaign in Soweto, also the party’s most-engaged Facebook content.

The community benefits from notable levels of focused amplification, with small groups of accounts repeatedly reposting the party, Malema and Sinawo Thambo; however, it is not possible to say from this analysis whether that is due to fan, activist or otherwise inauthentically coordinated behaviour. Given that the EFF community is where many paid influencers honed their skills and emerged from, the EFF likely disproportionately benefits from their historical loyalty.

Malema’s podcast with Nandi Madida, in which he called Africa’s borders a colonial product, resulted in anti-immigrant accounts mocking his stance on borders. Actor Tumisho Masha’s spat with EFF Johannesburg mayoral candidate Tlaleng Mofokeng and her supporters was among the week’s most-shared exchanges, with ActionSA president Herman Mashaba cheering Masha on.

RET and MK party supporters shrank to 4% of posts, down from 6%, with Mzwanele Manyi calling the asylum judgment “wrong”.

ActionSA: Betting on ‘South Africans First’

ActionSA campaigners had their busiest day of the week on 20 October, producing about three times their usual daily volume. That morning, Mashaba pushed the party’s manifesto under the slogan “put South Africans first”, promising to “confront our immigration crisis head-on” and declaring that ActionSA was “not here to save Africa”. It was the community’s most-shared post of the week, and the anti-immigrant communities reposted it too.

The manifesto was not the only driver though. A day earlier, the anti-immigrant account @joy_zelda asked Mashaba whether an extract from ActionSA’s immigration policy, which critics said committed the party to integrating migrants’ children, was genuine. Mashaba dismissed it as AI-generated. Critics replied that it was page 45 of the party’s own policy document and “literally on your website”.

And on the 40th anniversary of the Mbuzini crash that killed Samora Machel, Mashaba objected to Machel being honoured in South Africa. International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola called the comments “deeply disturbing”, and Zimbabwean journalist Hopewell Chin’ono called them “grand ignorance”.

Most of the day, though, was spent defending Tshwane mayor Nasiphi Moya over the water crisis, which made up nearly a third of the community’s posts that day. Bronkhorstspruit’s water went unchlorinated for 21 days and hundreds of people fell ill. About 6% of all X posts concerned Tshwane’s water and power failures, and ActionSA’s community carried more than a third of them. Mashaba framed the crisis as a tale of “two leaders” and urged voters to give Moya “five more years”. Some of her loudest defenders came from the anti-immigrant community.

Inside the GNU

The ANC and government community (9% of posts) leaned on official messaging. Fikile Mbalula returned from his collapse after the court ruling that the ANC’s late-submitted candidates would be accepted “fit as a fiddle”, and the mini budget’s fuel levy cut gave the government rare good news. On Facebook, the ANC’s most-engaged posts showed Cyril Ramaphosa’s Cape Town walkabouts.

On X, DA accounts were pulled into a single conservative bloc with Afrikaner activists (12% of posts), mostly because the same audiences amplified both: the bloc accounted for nine in 10 reposts of the DA’s own account and also widely shared Ernst Roets, Kallie Kriel and AfriForum, even though some of its members attacked the DA for drifting to the left. On Facebook, Helen Zille’s final Johannesburg rally was the week’s most-engaged political post, and Geordin Hill-Lewis moved into Mitchells Plain to join safety patrols.

Afrikaner conservatives: Race laws and free speech

Within the conservative bloc, Afrikaner voices focused on claims of racial exclusion at home. The trigger was a government policy that, critics said, bars state land from being leased to white farmers: Jaco Kleynhans called it “blatant, total racial exclusion”, and Roets argued that race-based farmland leases strengthen the case of minority persecution.

Free speech was the second front. Roets accused the chair of Parliament’s international relations committee of misquoting the Constitution’s free speech clause in a reply to his think-tank, Lex Libertas, and Renaldo Gouws attacked UCT for trying to silence two critics while allowing pro-Hamas displays on campus.

Kriel seized on Thabo Mbeki’s testimony at the Khampepe Commission, where AfriForum’s Gerrie Nel sought to cross-examine Mbeki, and Roets insisted that farm murders are not “normal crime”. Last week’s US-based community has vanished: only 6% of the conservative bloc’s users were in the US, even as Ramaphosa dismissed “white genocide” claims, a term that the local conservative community has been at great pains to avoid using.

Attacks across party lines

With two weeks to go, the attacks turned personal, and many were aimed at ActionSA:

DA vs ActionSA: The DA’s Cilliers Brink, who wants his old mayoral job back, led the attack under #BackBrink; the DA claimed cholera had been found in the water. ActionSA’s Michael Beaumont called Brink the “failed former mayor whose governance killed 31 people of cholera”, and Moya’s defenders pointed to the Hammanskraal cholera deaths under his administration.

EFF vs ActionSA: The EFF said it would open a case against Moya. Tshwane’s EFF MMC for health told Beaumont and Mashaba they did not know how the city they govern works, and the EFF’s Naledi Chirwa called ActionSA’s representatives “liars, manipulators, connivers”.

Rise Mzansi vs ActionSA: Songezo Zibi called Mashaba “a one-trick pony” who answers every question about roads or finances with illegal immigration.

EFF vs DA: Malema mocked Zille for spinning a Gusheshe at a rally and for “butchering” Brenda Fassie’s song.

Anti-immigrant activists vs EFF: Law-and-order accounts accused Tshwane’s EFF health MMC of insulting elderly residents at a clinic who objected to foreigners using it.

Paid influencers: Gauteng’s housing department is back

The suspected paid pool returned to the Gauteng government, as seen in previous weeks. On 21 October, about 64 accounts posted about 250 near-identical messages under #GautengHumanSettlements and #GrowingGautengTogether, praising Premier Panyaza Lesufi’s housing handover at the Elijah Barayi Mega Project; 29 of them posted their own versions within an hour, none marked as advertising, a likely scripted burst (many accounts posting their own near-identical campaign messages) consistent with coordinated activity.

The same hashtags ran on 30 September again. That morning the pool also revived the #KasiBusinessBoom township-economy push, with 11 accounts posting within 25 minutes, while Prasa’s campaign from previous weeks also continued to benefit from about 40 posts.

The same accounts above also appear to indulge in brand work. All 17 scripted bursts the analysis detected this week came from a single community of lifestyle promoters, and 20 of the 34 accounts in the Gauteng housing burst also took part in at least one of the 15 brand bursts that appeared to include possible campaigns for Just Travel SA, the Podcast and Chill tour and Roman’s Pizza.

The influencers also waded into Tshwane politics. One of the accounts leading the Lesufi push declared “ActionSA has failed in the City of Tshwane”, while others defended Moya. Paid disclosure continued to be inconsistently indicated: three-quarters of Samsung posts carried #ad, but Just Travel SA and the Podcast and Chill tour posts carried none.

The anti-immigrant post that the suspected paid influencers shared most claimed Oliver Tambo died so that Ramaphosa could “sell this country to illegal foreigners”. The pool’s anti-immigrant voices benefit from notable levels of focused amplification, with small groups of accounts repeatedly reposting them; however, it is not possible to say from this analysis whether that is due to fan, activist or otherwise inauthentically coordinated behaviour.

Wrapping it all up

The anti-immigrant movement is becoming a voting bloc. ActionSA has put the movement’s slogan at the centre of its manifesto, and the movement’s activists are defending ActionSA’s mayor. That makes Tshwane, where failing water collided with this alliance, the clearest test of whether that vote can be delivered, and it has made ActionSA the main target of the DA, the EFF, the ANC and Rise Mzansi alike.

The EFF is mobilising its base harder than at any point in this campaign, while Afrikaner conservatives are fighting a different battle, over race-based policy and free speech. And, influencers linked to likely paid brand promotions often jump the line to also promote politics: accounts that pushed brands such as Just Travel SA and the Podcast and Chill tour also promoted Lesufi’s ANC-run Gauteng government, while others took sides for and against ActionSA in Tshwane, or attacked the ANC. DM

Aldu Cornelissen is a pioneer in AI-driven pipelines and analytics of complex unstructured data, and is the technical mind and co-founder of Murmur Intelligence and LLMEKNOW, both Cape Town-based organisations.

Kyle Findlay is a renowned researcher and speaker on the topic of digital influence and is the co-founder of Murmur Intelligence and LLMEKNOW, both Cape Town-based organisations.