*Photo: Halima Imam*
The sun had barely crested the Sunnyside skyline in Pretoria when Chidi’s world collapsed, not from the dawn, but from the sound of shattering glass and the chant of a mob that had forgotten its history. Chidi, who left Enugu a decade ago to build a modest electronics business, did not see neighbors that morning. He saw a wall of rage, organised, purposeful, and familiar.
As his livelihood went up in smoke , acrid rubber and burning dreams, one question cut through the sirens louder than all else: Is this what we paid for in blood?
The recurring nightmare of xenophobic violence in South Africa has metastasised into something more sinister. What was once dismissed as sporadic “clashes” has hardened into a systematic campaign against foreign nationals, particularly Nigerians, where “foreigner” has become a synonym for “target.” Between 1994 and March 2024, Witwatersrand University’s Xenowatch project documented 669 deaths, 5,310 looted shops, and 127,572 forcible displacements of foreign nationals in South Africa. In the single month of May 2008, attacks swept at least 135 locations simultaneously, leaving 62 dead, 1,700 injured, and over 100,000 displaced.
The violence of April 2026, which triggered protests and anti-immigrant marches in Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, has reignited these wounds and forced Nigeria’s National Assembly to convene emergency sessions. Two Nigerians lost their lives in those incidents. Another cycle. Another silence. Another set of burnt storefronts.
We cannot continue to mourn without memory.
There is a specific kind of bitterness that comes from watching a sibling strike the hand that once pulled them from a pit. It is not ordinary anger. It is grief wearing the face of betrayal.
During the dark decades of apartheid, Nigeria did not merely sympathise from the sidelines. We were a frontline state in spirit, treasury, and sacrifice. On April 4, 1961, barely one year after independence, Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa sent a formal message of solidarity to the African National Congress (ANC), making Nigeria one of the first governments on earth to officially endorse the liberation struggle. From those early years, Nigeria extended a structured annual subvention of approximately $5 million to both the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), sustained across successive administrations, military and civilian alike.
In 1976, following the massacre of hundreds of students by apartheid police during the Soweto Uprising, Nigeria went further. The Federal Government established the Southern Africa Relief Fund (SARF), a direct financial lifeline for apartheid’s victims. Nigerian workers contributed two percent of their monthly salaries. Students at universities across the country skipped meals to donate. Within just six months, the fund had amassed $10.5 million in popular contributions. These donations became known, quietly and proudly, as the “Mandela Tax”, a voluntary levy of conscience paid by ordinary Nigerians who had never met a South African but believed, without hesitation, that injustice anywhere on African soil was their personal business.
General Olusegun Obasanjo, then head of state, personally contributed $3,000 to the fund. Each member of his cabinet donated $1,500. The government itself contributed $3.7 million. And when South African activists found that the apartheid regime had confiscated their travel documents, stranding them, silencing them, erasing them from the world’s stage , Nigeria issued more than 300 passports to South African exiles so they could travel, organise, and rally global support for their liberation.
Among the South Africans who lived in Nigeria during this period was a young Thabo Mbeki, who spent seven years in Lagos before moving to the ANC headquarters in Lusaka, and who would later become President of the very nation now burning Nigerian shops.
From 1960 to 1994, Nigeria contributed an estimated $61 billion toward the total anti-apartheid effort, more than any other country in the world according to the South African Institute of International Affairs. Nigeria also boycotted the 1976 Olympics and the 1979 Commonwealth Games in protest of apartheid. We were not a cheerleader from the gallery. We were on the field, bleeding.
Today, the reward for that sacrifice is the charred ruins of Nigerian businesses and the sight of our citizens being hunted in the very streets that their predecessors helped to liberate.
While Nigerian lives are imperilled, the response from Abuja has too often felt like a whisper in a hurricane.
There are signs that Nigeria is beginning to stiffen its spine. In early May 2026, the Federal Government summoned South Africa’s Acting High Commissioner to Nigeria, Lesoli Machele, to formally register its displeasure. Foreign Minister Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu publicly conveyed President Bola Tinubu’s alarm. The Senate resolved to dispatch a high-level joint delegation, led by Senate President Godswill Akpabio, to address the South African parliament directly. The House of Representatives went further, calling for a review of bilateral relations and the possible suspension of business permits for South African companies operating in Nigeria.
These are useful first steps. But they come decades too late and must now become a posture, not a press release.
We look to the continent and see a different threshold of indignation. During previous waves of xenophobic violence, Zambia’s President Edgar Lungu did not reach for diplomatic language , he called for African Union and SADC intervention and warned that the carnage risked destabilising African unity. Tanzania has historically been swift to recall envoys when its citizens are mistreated abroad. Smaller nations have drawn clearer lines than Africa’s supposed giant.
Why? South Africa is Nigeria’s largest trading partner on the continent. South African corporations, from banks to retail chains to telecommunications giants, operate profitably across Nigeria’s 200-million-strong market. That leverage is real, and it has not been used. Diplomacy without consequence is simply correspondence.
Honest analysis demands that we look at the full picture, not merely the one that flatters our outrage.
South Africa carries wounds that did not heal with the end of apartheid. Its unemployment rate sits at approximately 33 percent, among the highest in the world; for young Black South Africans, it exceeds 45 percent. Into this landscape of frustrated aspiration, migrants arrive , often willing to work longer hours, accept lower margins, and outcompete locals in informal commerce. The resulting resentment is economically legible even if morally inexcusable.
What is unforgivable is the role of political entrepreneurship. The uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), Operation Dudula , whose name literally means “to remove by force” , and others have built movements on the deliberate weaponisation of anti-immigrant sentiment. They are not expressing popular frustration; they are manufacturing it. When politicians normalise slurs and when manifestos promise to “prioritise South African workers over foreign nationals in all sectors,” they are not describing policy, they are issuing hunting licences.
The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has condemned this as a pattern, noting incidents from 1998 through to 2026, constituting possible violations of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The Commission has called on the South African government not merely to issue statements of condemnation but to dismantle vigilante networks, enhance protection in high-risk areas, and hold perpetrators personally accountable.
That accountability has not come. And Nigeria has been too patient.
Mourning without strategy is merely noise. Here is what must happen.
First: Reciprocity with teeth. Nigeria must move from diplomatic engagement to diplomatic consequence. If South Africa cannot guarantee the security of Nigerian nationals and businesses, Nigeria must formally review the operating conditions for South African conglomerates currently thriving in its markets. This is not hostility, it is the language that sovereign nations speak when other sovereigns ignore their citizens’ distress. A moratorium on new South African business licences, pending a formal bilateral security framework, would concentrate minds rapidly.
Second: A proactive legal task force. The Nigerian High Commission in Pretoria and Johannesburg needs a dedicated, well-funded legal unit, not a helpline, not a hotline, but a team of lawyers authorised to file civil suits and pursue class-action claims against local politicians and instigators of anti-Nigerian violence under African Charter provisions and South African constitutional law. Prosecutorial exposure changes behaviour. Impunity sustains cycles of violence.
Third: Historical memory through the African Union. Nigeria must formally propose, through the AU, that the history of Pan-African solidarity, including Nigeria’s documented financial, diplomatic, and human role in ending apartheid, be incorporated into South African secondary school curricula. Much of the violence is driven by a generation raised in a vacuum of historical gratitude. They do not know that Nigerian students skipped lunch so their parents could be free. They must learn it.
South Africa is not irredeemable. Its Constitution is among the most progressive on earth. Its official government, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, has repeatedly affirmed the country’s commitment to Pan-Africanism and condemned vigilante violence. The African Commission’s intervention in April 2026 shows that the continent’s institutions are finally treating this as the human rights emergency it is.
But statements are not security. And solidarity cannot be a one-way street navigated entirely by the people who once wrote the cheques.
History is a patient teacher, but the streets of Johannesburg are running out of time. If South Africa continues to permit the persecution of the very people whose parents financed its freedom, it risks losing not just a neighbour , but the moral authority that Nelson Mandela’s rainbow cost so much to build.
Chidi’s shop is gone. The question is whether South Africa’s soul will follow.