Blaming immigrants for our woes is the oldest and worst trick in the book — why do people still fall for it?

When I was a kid, my parents gave me a little box of magic tricks. It had everything an aspiring magician could ask for. A set of dice, little ropes, a deck of cards and of course, a magic wand.

I never quite grasped the necessary sleight of hand. Instead, I mastered one terrible card trick that I would perform to my aunts, uncles and parents who would smile politely and feign wonder. I knew the trick was no good and they knew it too, and yet we persevered in this strange magical charade. It was easier than facing up to the hard truth that I was never destined to be a magician.

I saw a similarly awful bit of magic recently, performed by the Limpopo MEC for health, Dr Phophi Ramathuba. Like me, she had her captive audience, except hers was a gaggle of middle management shuffling behind her on her tour of Bela-Bela hospital and a bed-bound patient from Zimbabwe.

Ramathuba publicly berated the patient for “killing her health system” and in a spectacular display of gaslighting, claimed the patient was in fact “abusing” her. In her final flourish, she turned to her audience to bleat some Zuma-esque statistics before demanding that the patient be held captive and not discharged until her bill was paid.

The deception, in case you missed it, is to lay the blame for our crumbling health system at the feet of undocumented migrants rather than exorbitant tenders for PPE worth half a billion rand. In magic, this is known as misdirection.

The key to good misdirection is shifting the audience’s attention to something interesting, but unrelated. Performed correctly, they’ll be unaware that they have been manipulated, believing their attention has been precisely where it needed to be the whole time. In politics, this is called bullshit.

Whatever you want to call it, Ramathuba’s a bad magician. She knows it and deep down, her audience must know it too. Still, it’s easier than facing up to the hard truth, that deep-rooted corruption in the ANC is responsible for the decay of every major sector of public services and it’s only getting worse.