Janet Mbugua Opens Up About Her Horrible Experiences As She Worked In South Africa

For the first time ever since leaving South Africa to work at Citizen TV, celebrated news anchor Janet Mbugua has opened up on what she knows about South Africans after working there for close to five years.

Janet Mbugua came back home in 2011 when Citizen TV tracked her services from a South African media house and has since excelled in her role as a prime time news reader.

But her days in South Africa are not days she would want to remember. Through a Facebook post, Janet says that she always lived in fear of being a foreigner because South Africans always had this xenophobic feeling towards foreigners and always felt like they were invading their space.

She says that South Africa called foreigners Kwere Kwere, a derogatory term referring to African immigrants.

“Living in South Africa always left me feeling unsettled. There was always an underlying sense of fear and concern regarding my status as a ‘Kwere Kwere’ (their derogatory term for African immigrants) and I wasn’t able to easily secure my work permit because of the same.”

She also narrates how an official at a South African embassy in Nairobi felt embarrassed when Janet went to apply for her work permit and openly asked her why not a South Africa but a Kenyan. Janet was lost for words and simply told her to ask the company that hired her.

“I even remember one of the women working at the immigration department at the SA high commission in Nairobi asking me, ‘why you, why not a South African?’ My answer to her was always, ‘ask the South African company that head hunted me!’. I would later secure a work permit and contract for five years but I was by then too jaded to stay. I was relieved to finally leave and come back home in 2011. Although my colleagues and the organization I worked for treated me very well, living there, you could feel this sense of loathing towards fellow Africans building up, now it’s boiled over in the worst possible way, including the murder of five foreigners, among them a 14-year-old boy (open link for the rest of the story). South Africa needs serious healing and to hold the careless leaders inciting this madness accountable, while the rest of us need to do a serious self audit of how we treat each other. Something’s got to change. Now.”

She has revealed that her employers were, however, good and friendly.

South Africans have continued to kill foreigners in the country through xenophobic attacks which have spread from Durban to Johannesburg.

Janet has called for an end to the xenophobic killings in South Africa.