MTN Group, Africa’s largest telecommunications operator, is warning that South Africa’s intensifying migration debate could carry consequences beyond domestic politics by restricting the movement of skills, talent and businesses across the continent.

The company has built one of Africa’s biggest telecoms businesses, serving 312.7 million customers in 19 markets across Africa and the Middle East. Because much of MTN’s growth now comes from outside South Africa, the group says rising hostility toward African migrants conflicts with the regional integration on which its business model and long-term expansion depend.

The issue has reverberated across MTN’s operating footprint. Nigeria and Ghana, two of the company’s largest markets, have joined Zimbabwe, Malawi and Eswatini in evacuating citizens from South Africa after the March and March Movement, an anti-immigration activist group, gave undocumented migrants a June 30 deadline to leave the country.

MTN executives addressed the issue on Thursday at the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation’s Winter Seminar, which focused on migration. They presented a business case for open borders, arguing that Africa’s future will depend on expanding economic opportunity, improving digital connectivity and allowing skills and talent to move more freely across the continent.

For telecom operators, cross-border mobility is also an operational issue. Building and maintaining digital networks across multiple markets depends on technical skills, management capacity, suppliers and capital moving through regional systems that are predictable enough for long-term investment.

“If our discussion ends with the language of crisis around migration, we will have treated the symptom and missed the deeper challenge,” MTN Group President and chief executive officer Ralph Mupita said. “People move because opportunity is unevenly distributed. The defining question is whether we can build economies in which mobility is matched by opportunity.”

MTN’s comments come after months of attacks on foreign-owned businesses in South Africa, forced evictions of migrants and escalating anti-immigration rhetoric ahead of the country’s local government elections in November.

For a company whose growth has been built on connecting Africans across borders, those developments have become difficult to ignore. Mupita linked his own migration history to MTN’s broader identity as a pan-African company.

“I also want to admit that I’m a migrant, 35 years in South Africa,” he told the audience. “I’m from Zimbabwe… My surname, Mupita, means ‘the one who moves from place to place.'” He said he has relatives across Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Angola, before adding: “So that’s who I am. I’m an African.”

Mupita said his personal story reflected MTN’s own journey across the continent. “I happen to be an African who is a steward… of an organisation that was born in South Africa,” he said. He recalled that one of Nelson Mandela’s earliest decisions after the country’s transition to democracy was the issuing of mobile licences in September 1993, a step that led to MTN’s creation.

Today, MTN is Africa’s largest telecommunications operator. Mupita argued that the company’s success is closely tied to the continent’s broader prosperity.

“The future of Africa will not be determined by the borders that separate us, but by the economic opportunities that connect us,” he said. “Governments must set predictable policy and regulations. Businesses will follow and allocate resources and capital. Together, we can build a continent where opportunity is more evenly shared, and prosperity is more widely created.”

MTN Chairman Mcebisi Jonas said immigration has become a convenient political scapegoat for deeper economic problems in South Africa.

“Our markets are in Africa. Our opportunities are in Africa. Our future is in Africa,” Jonas said. “South Africa cannot present itself as open for investment while treating African workers and traders with hostility. It sends a contradictory message: Africans are welcome as customers and investors, but not as people.”

Jonas said removing migrants would not resolve South Africa’s underlying economic challenges.

“South Africa’s economic crisis is a product of weak growth, poor governance, inadequate education outcomes, infrastructure failures and structural inequality. If every foreign national left the country tomorrow, those problems would remain,” he said.

He added that South Africa continues to lose skilled citizens through emigration while also making it difficult for skilled foreigners to remain in the country. Jonas said that contradiction weakens South Africa’s competitiveness in an economy increasingly shaped by technology.

The seminar’s broader message was that migration cannot be separated from Africa’s economic transformation. The policy question for governments is whether migration rules can address domestic concerns while still supporting the skills flows needed for digital infrastructure, entrepreneurship and regional trade.

Dr Ishmael Yamson, chairman of MTN Ghana’s board, said Africa’s demographic growth will translate into prosperity only if governments invest heavily in digital capabilities.

“Africa’s future competitiveness will depend on how successfully we equip young people with digital skills, entrepreneurial skills, technical skills and leadership capabilities,” Yamson said. “The demographic dividend must become a skills dividend.”