⬆️Members of The Bridge Club with guests at the end-of-the-year symposium of The Bridge Club Lagos on Xenophobia and Pan-Africanism on Thursday at the Continental Hotel, Lagos.
Renowned Kenyan scholar and statesman, Professor PLO Lumumba has warned that Africa risks betraying its own Pan-African ideals if it continues to treat fellow Africans as foreigners across colonial borders.
L-R: The panelists, Hon. Abdulrahman Abba Terab and Amb.Godwin Adakole Adama with the moderator, ace broadcaster, Kadaria Ahmed at the end-of-the-year symposium of The Bridge Club Lagos on Xenophobia and Pan-Africanism on Thursday at the Continental Hotel, Lagos.
Delivering a keynote address titled “Africa Must Not Become Foreign to Itself: Xenophobia, Pan-Africanism and the Future of African Belonging” at the invitation of The Bridge Club in Lagos on Thursday, 12th November, 2026, Lumumba described xenophobia as a profound ideological contradiction at the heart of the African condition.
“The great tragedy of African xenophobia is that a people once divided by strangers have learnt to regard one another as strangers,” he said. “Pan-Africanism will remain an unfinished promise for as long as an African can cross a colonial border and suddenly cease to be regarded as a brother or sister.”
Lumumba noted that generations of African leaders—from Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere to the founders of the Organisation of African Unity and the African Union—have proclaimed the unity of the African people and the artificiality of colonial divisions.
He observed that while the
African Continental Free Trade Area
is celebrated today as a vital step towards economic integration, the moment an African crosses a border—whether a Ghanaian in Nigeria, a Nigerian in South Africa, a Zimbabwean in Johannesburg, or a Congolese citizen elsewhere—the language of continental brotherhood often collapses under the weight of nationality, employment, and economic competition.
He stressed that Pan-Africanism was never merely a diplomatic arrangement among governments. At its core, it is a philosophy of African human solidarity that demands Africans recognise something of themselves in one another without erasing national identity, he stressed.
“A Nigerian need not cease being Nigerian in order to recognise a Ghanaian as a fellow African,” he said. “A healthy patriotism can coexist comfortably with Pan-African solidarity; it is insecure nationalism that requires an outsider against whom national identity may constantly be defined.”
Lumumba rejected the idea that xenophobia is a uniquely South African problem. He recalled Ghana’s 1969 Aliens Compliance Order, which displaced hundreds of thousands of West African migrants, many of them Nigerian, and Nigeria’s own mass expulsions of undocumented migrants in 1983 and 1985, which forced an estimated two million people, including about 1.2 million Ghanaians, to leave. “The nationality of the stranger had changed, but the political logic had not,” he observed. “Economic difficulty produced fear. Fear searched for an explanation. The migrant provided an easy target.”
Turning to South Africa, he described the country’s experience as a painful warning. He said despite the enormous support African countries gave to the anti-apartheid struggle, democratic South Africa has repeatedly seen African migrants targeted in violence, most recently through organised movements such as Operation Dudula.
He noted though that the Gauteng High Court in November 2025 interdicted the rampaging
group from demanding identity documents, intimidating foreigners or blocking access to healthcare and schools.
Lumumba distinguished legitimate state regulation of migration from collective hostility. Every sovereign state has the right to control its borders and enforce its laws, he said. Pan-Africanism does not require open borders or immunity for those who break the law. But there is a vast moral distance between lawful immigration control and the scapegoating of entire nationalities for unemployment, crime or pressure on public services, he pointed out .
“The danger begins when legitimate concerns acquire a nationality,” he warned. “When unemployment is high, the migrant becomes the face of unemployment. When clinics are overcrowded, the foreign patient becomes the explanation for the weakness of the health system. It is easier to identify a stranger than to repair an economy.”
He linked the rise of xenophobia to deeper economic failures: the continued export of raw materials and import of finished goods, weak industrialisation, and the inability of African economies to create enough dignified jobs for their young people. Recent Afrobarometer surveys, he noted, show that while a majority of Africans support freer regional movement in principle, a substantial majority also prefer fewer foreign job seekers in their own countries.
“The struggle against xenophobia is inseparable from the struggle for African development,” Lumumba concluded. “A continent that creates too few jobs will continuously generate political temptation to fight over the jobs that exist. The border must cease to be the place where Pan-Africanism ends. It should become the place where Pan-Africanism is tested.”