South Africa’s Shame

There is a particular cruelty in what is happening to Nigerians and other African migrants in South Africa right now. These are people who crossed borders within the same continent, many of them fleeing hardship, seeking opportunity, building lives with whatever they had. And in the country that the world once held up as the moral triumph of the African story, the nation of Mandela, of ubuntu, of the rainbow nation , they are being hunted, beaten, and killed. Shops are being torched. Families are hiding. And as of last week, two Nigerian nationals are reportedly dead.

Let us be precise about what is happening before the language of diplomacy softens it beyond recognition. Groups operating under names like Operation Dudula and March and March have been mobilising across South Africa’s nine provinces, with the explicit aim of driving foreign nationals  documented and undocumented alike  out of the country. Their rhetoric does not distinguish between a legal resident and an illegal one. Their targets are Black Africans. The protests planned for May 4 were not civic demonstrations in any meaningful sense. They were organised intimidation campaigns, with protesters openly demanding that police stand aside  “leave us alone so we can sort them out,” one organiser said. That is not protest. That is an invitation to a pogrom.

Nigeria’s Consulate General in Johannesburg was right to issue its security advisory. It was right to warn Nigerian business owners to shutter their shops. It was right to urge citizens to avoid confrontation. These are the advisories of a mission operating in a country where its nationals cannot rely on the host government’s protection. That reality alone should register as the indictment it is.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has condemned the attacks as unjustifiable. His foreign affairs minister, Ronald Lamola, called the violence a threat to South Africa’s constitutional order. The police minister, Firoz Cachalia, declared that xenophobia would not be tolerated under any circumstances. These are the right words. They are also, by now, completely worthless because South Africa has been saying them for over two decades while the attacks keep coming.

The 2008 xenophobic pogrom killed 62 people and displaced tens of thousands. In 2015, attacks on foreign nationals spread from Durban to Johannesburg and required military deployment to suppress. In 2019, another wave of violence targeted Nigerian-owned businesses, prompting Nigeria to recall its high commissioner and Nigerian protesters to attack South African businesses in Lagos and Abuja. Each time, South African officials condemned. Each time, they promised accountability. Each time, the cycle resumed. What has changed? Nigerian nationals are now dead again in 2026, and Abuja has summoned Pretoria’s acting high commissioner for the fourth or fifth time in a decade. The summoning of ambassadors is beginning to feel like its own ritual performed, noted, forgotten.

This newspaper understands the economic frustration that underlies these tensions. South Africa’s unemployment rate sits at over 33 percent, one of the highest in the world. Service delivery has collapsed in many townships. The ANC government has presided over load-shedding, water shortages, and a social contract that has visibly frayed. When a population is that desperate, scapegoats become irresistible  and foreign nationals, visible and vulnerable, are the easiest target. That explanation has merit as sociology. It has none as justification.

The experts are right: migrants are being made to pay for failures of governance that predate their arrival and would persist long after their departure. Foreign nationals running spaza shops in Soweto did not cause South Africa’s unemployment crisis. Nigerian traders in Johannesburg did not design the ANC’s failed economic policies. Zimbabwean workers in Cape Town did not drain the state’s social welfare budget. The political class that has mismanaged South Africa for three decades is responsible for South Africa’s condition. It is the height of moral cowardice to allow that class to redirect popular rage toward the most defenceless people in the country.

Nigeria has been measured in its response so far, and appropriately so. The arrangement of voluntary repatriation flights for the 130-plus Nigerians who have registered is a responsible act of consular duty. The summoning of South Africa’s acting high commissioner signals that Abuja is watching and will not be silent. But there is a harder question that Nigeria and the African Union must now ask openly: at what point does the pattern of recurring violence against African migrants in South Africa, violence that targets specifically Black Africans, while the country’s significant non-African migrant communities are largely left alone  constitute something that demands a more structural response?

The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was unambiguous last month when he said he was deeply concerned by xenophobic attacks and acts of harassment against migrants. “Violence, vigilantism and all forms of incitement to hatred have no place in an inclusive, democratic society,” he said. South Africa presents itself to the world as exactly that. The gap between that self-presentation and the reality on its streets is becoming impossible to ignore.

What Nigeria must demand, through every diplomatic channel available, is not sympathy but accountability. South African authorities must arrest, prosecute, and convict the organisers and perpetrators of these attacks. Not in the performative way that has followed previous cycles: a few arrests, charges quietly dropped, no convictions but with the full weight of South African law applied consistently. The families of Nigerians who have died deserve justice, not condolences. The hundreds more who are frightened and hiding deserve protection, not advisories to stay indoors.

South Africa owes Africa a debt it has never acknowledged. The continent sheltered the ANC when apartheid made South Africa uninhabitable for its own people. African nations provided sanctuary and solidarity for decades. To now visit violence on the children of that same continent is a betrayal no diplomatic language can make acceptable. Ramaphosa knows this. His foreign minister knows this. The question is whether they have the courage to govern accordingly, or whether they will once again condemn, delay, and wait for the next cycle to begin.