A bond that must never be broken (6), By Femi Fani-Kayode

The South African people, as hostile, violent, aggressive and annoying as some of them may be, are our African brothers and sisters, and given all they have been through they do not deserve our anger and hate but rather our compassion, sympathy, love, care, support, concern and pity… Regardless of all, we must offer them all these things, re-build the bridge and work closely with them for the sake of our collective future.

Permit me to once again share the words of the Sweden-based Nigerian writer, Prince Kio Jaja Amachree. He wrote the following on X:

“In 1990 when Mandela came to thank Nigeria for its support to the ANC and the Pan African Congress he was given 10 ten million USD by the Nigerian Government as our further contribution to the ANC when he was leaving. 61 billion dollars was the total figure that Nigeria donated to the ANC and the Pan African Congress by 1994. Adjusted for three decades of inflation, and with even a conservative rate of interest applied, as any court applies to any unpaid debt, the true present value of Nigeria’s sacrifice runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars.”

He went further by saying, “this was money that Nigeria, with its own crushing debt burden, collapsing infrastructure and 130 million of its own citizens living in multidimensional poverty, needs desperately at home.”

He was right.

He went on to ask the following question and immediately provided the answer.

“How the debt is being repaid? Here is how South Africa has serviced this account in the year 2026. Musa Yunana Joe and Charles Iroegbu, two Nigerian nationals, were killed on June 28, one allegedly at the hands of South African police officers, the other by attackers who remain conveniently unidentified. They died two days before an unofficial deadline set by anti migrant vigilantes for foreigners to leave the country. They were not the first this year. In April, Amaramiro Emmanuel was beaten to death, according to Nigeria’s consul general, by officers of the South African National Defence Force, soldiers of the very state Nigerian money helped bring into being. Ekpenyong Andrew was arrested in Pretoria and was next seen in a mortuary. The mobs of Operation Dudula and the March and March movement have marched through Johannesburg and Durban, some in warrior dress, carrying spears, whips and shields, telling African migrants to leave or, in the words circulated on their platforms, return in a coffin. By early July, nearly 600 Nigerians had been evacuated on emergency flights, with roughly 1000 registered to flee, abandoning shops, cars, homes and life savings built over decades. Across all nationalities, more than 13000 African migrants have been driven out in a matter of weeks. None of this is new. It is the fourth great wave. After 2008, when more than 60 people were butchered. After 2015. After 2019. Each time, Pretoria issues its regrets. Each time, no meaningful prosecutions follow. Each time, the machetes return. This is how South Africa repays the country that paid for its freedom.”

Amachree’s analysis is factual and unassailable.

He concluded with the following.

“History matters! Those who say Nigerians should stop talking about South Africa and face Nigeria’s own problems have it exactly backwards. This is Nigeria’s problem. It is 61 billion dollars of Nigeria’s problem. Money taken from the salaries of Nigerian clerks and the pockets of Nigerian students and the treasury of a struggling young republic, invested in the freedom of a people whose government now cannot summon the will to stop mobs from hunting Nigerians in the streets. Nelson Mandela knew what Nigeria had done. He said so, in Lagos, on camera, in 1990. The tragedy is that the nation he founded has chosen amnesia. Nigeria and 220 million Nigerians have not forgotten. The dead, Musa, Charles, Amaramiro, Ekpenyong, and the scores before them, will have justice. Through courts, through commissions, through commerce, and through the unyielding memory of history. Not today, perhaps. But the ledger is open, the arithmetic is documented, and history, as it always does, will collect.”

Can anyone dispute what he has said?

Now consider the following words which came from one Phakel Umthakaki Ndanbandaba, who is one of leaders of March on March and who was recently hosted by President Cyril Ramaphosa.

In front of a massive and unruly crowd of supporters a few days ago he said, “I don’t sleep because I am so scared that PEOPLE FROM NIGERIA who are feeding our kids drugs are here in this country. They are all very dangerous people. And as a man, I took it upon myself to say, you know, let me choose death than to look at what is going on like this. Let me protect our kids. Let me protect our law enforcement officers. Let me protect even our government.”

I am not given to responding to those whose words are fuelled by ignorance, racism, Afrophobia and hate but in this case I will make an exception.

Someone should remind this Zulu Phakel that innocent Nigerians don’t sleep easily in South Africa anymore because they are being targeted, beaten, persecuted and killed like chickens in the streets by murderous, homicidal mobs that walk around half-naked, wielding axes and spears, and that are led by thugs like him.

It is the job of law enforcement to catch drug dealers and we support them in doing so wherever those dealers are from, but it is not the job of angry mobs who always lump the innocent and kill them with the guilty to do so.

What this man is doing is called race-baiting and incitement against Nigerians and he is endangering our lives.

He is also being supported, encouraged and bankrolled by a hidden foreign hand, to do all this because he is not capable of doing it on his own.

Yet the question must be asked, has it not occurred to this Zulu Phakel that Nigerians are not the only ones selling drugs in his country?

Some do, just as South Africans smuggle in and sell drugs to Nigerians in Nigeria and South Africa too, but we cannot possibly demonise all South Africans and call them all drug dealers.

There are evil men that are involved in this evil trade from both sides and the answer is for the good men and women on both sides to join forces and resist them.

The answer is NOT to criminalise and demonise all Nigerians and label us as drug dealers.

This has to stop.

One of the leaders of the South African opposition by the name of Herman Mashaba, who we have been reliably informed is one of those bankrolling the madness and egging thugs like Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma and Phakel Umkathaki Ndanbandaba on, said the following on X:

“South Africa is not going to be blackmailed by anyone or country to accept illegality because they claim to have assisted during apartheid.”

Mashaba would do well to take heed of the following words.

Outside of that, one thing is clear: those that carry out these barbaric hate crimes and acts of Afrophobia in South Africa deserve more of our pity than our anger… I say this because when you see a black South African attacking or threatening a foreign African national and telling him to “go back home,” it is like a person pouring petrol all over his own body, setting a match to it and burning himself alive.

Nigeria will not sit by silently as our nationals are being targeted and killed.

Deny it as much as you like, but the truth is that if not for us you would still be in chains.

No one is asking South Africa to accept illegality.

If you choose to be ungrateful and repay our good with evil, that is your call and we leave you to God.

Needless to say, had it not been for our efforts during your struggle, you would still be bondage and abject poverty today and probably be speaking Afrikaans as your national language.

Do as you please but what we insist on is that you operate according to due process and within the law and stop vilifying, demonising, targetting and killing our nationals.

Is this too much to ask?

If you insist on taking the course you have chosen, know that nothing is off the table and there will be consequences which will come at a time and place of our own choosing.

Nigerian lives are precious. For each one that your thugs take, there will be a heavy price to pay.

Know this and know peace. A word is enough for the wise.

Permit me to add the following.

Many in our country are boiling with anger today about what is happening to our compatriots in South Africa and this is understandable.

The situation is unacceptable and has, rightly, resulted in outrage, not just in Nigeria but throughout the entire African continent and indeed the civilised world.

As I approach the end of this contribution, I appeal for restraint, understanding, patience and calm from our people, despite the smears, violence, and mindless and inexplicable provocations for, as the Bible says, “this too shall pass.”

Outside of that, one thing is clear: those that carry out these barbaric hate crimes and acts of Afrophobia in South Africa deserve more of our pity than our anger.

I say this because when you see a black South African attacking or threatening a foreign African national and telling him to “go back home,” it is like a person pouring petrol all over his own body, setting a match to it and burning himself alive.

The reality is that we are one and when a black South African attacks an African national, he is attacking himself.

Coupled with this is the issue of suppressed and ingrained trauma, which came as a consequence of the Apartheid years and which a respected South African leader by the name of Zwelinzima Vavi, the Secretary General of the South African Federation of Trade Unions, alluded to and I mentioned in part four of this series.

The truth is that when the black South African vents such hate towards his fellow black Africans for no just cause, it is essentially a manifestation of the deep-set psychological trauma that Vavi was referring to.

It is not only uncontrollable but it is also pathological.

And coupled with poverty and the lack of any real prospect of rising to the top, it’s cause is obvious yet lost on most.

To establish that cause one has to study the history of the black South African and know what he has been through and where he is coming from.

The situation was simply shocking for the black majority population in Apartheid South Africa and many from other parts of the world have either forgotten or never knew.

What was done to them can best be compared to what was done to the Africans who were captured, transported like cattle, and sold into slavery in America and the Caribbean centuries ago, and what was done to the Herero and Nama tribes in modern-day Namibia by Imperial pre-World War 1 Germany, which literally wiped them out and ethnically cleansed them during colonial rule in the early 19th century.

For four hundred years and particularly after the Apartheid system was fully established, it was not just a question of South Africans being denied the right to lead and rule in their own country. It was far more insidious and worse than that.

The whole system was designed to dehumanise and destroy the psyche of the black South African, crush his spirit, wound his soul, rob him of his manhood, turn him into what in modern parlance is described as the proverbial “cuck” and strip him of all hope.

I am constrained to set my prejudices aside and reluctantly admit that no one put it better than the self-exiled Nigerian opposition figure, dissident and author by the name of David Hundeyin, who wrote the following on his X handle: “the apartheid system created laws restricting black people to ‘Bantu education’ with movement restrictions and racial hub quotas, forbidding them from getting middle or high income jobs, creating unbreakable multi- generational poverty for 89% of the country’s population.”

He forgot to add the fact that black people were not allowed to live in the cities but only to go and work there, after which they were compelled to return to their filthy, run-down ghettoes and townships at the close of work.

Many forget that black South Africans only won their freedom and independence 32 years ago and up until today they are still suffering from total and complete economic bondage, because the wealth of the nation is still concentrated and trapped in the hands of a tiny white minority… This is what has led to so much frustration, resentment, anger and bitterness amongst black South Africans, and sadly instead of resolving the issue by insisting on a more equitable degree of wealth sharing, they are targeting foreign black African nationals and venting their spleen on them.

Worse still, they were required to use passes as they moved around, rather like the Palestinians who enter Israel to look for work are required to do today.

This understandably resulted in protests, which led to the massacre of 69 black South Africans and 180 injured by South African security forces in a town called Sharpeville on 21st March 1960.

Blacks who did not live in the townships and serve as a cheap labour force for the cities were forced to move and exiled to their distant ‘homelands’ in the countryside, which were little better than empty and barren reservations.

One needs to stop and actually ponder on this to fully appreciate it’s implications. There was no freedom of movement or freedom of choice in the matter.

As a black South African, you were basically a slave who lived to serve the interests of the Boers and Afrikaners or you were confined and restricted to a homeland which was not only hopeless and empty but also in the middle of nowhere.

They called all this “separate development” which, when translated to Afrikaans, is “Apartheid”.

It was so bad that at some point there was an attempt by the Apartheid state to make ALL black South African children be taught in only Afrikaans, the language of the white Boers, in school.

This was the greatest humiliation and cultural imposition of all.

When you take away a man’s language and compel his children to learn and speak in only yours, you have taken away his heritage, history, essence and soul, and left him with nothing.

And that was precisely the purpose of the exercise.

It also represented the most compelling evidence of total subjugation and conquest, because it sought to strip the African bare and deny him of the memory of who he was, what language he once spoke, and where he was coming from.

Simply put, it was evil.

Understandably, this resulted in protests by the children themselves and that is what led to the massacres of no less than 700 to 1000 CHILDREN by the South African police and security forces in Soweto on 17th June 1976.

Yet it got worse.

The South African Roman Dutch Church officially regarded and described black people as being the Biblical “drawers of the water and hewers of the wood” that chapter 9 verse 21 of the Book of Joshua in the Holy Bible referred to and were therefore nothing but “accursed slaves.”

As far as the South African Roman Dutch Church was concerned, black Africans, including the Bantus of South Africa, were the descendants of Ham who had been cursed by God thousands of years ago!

It is with this gross and perverse manipulation and misinterpretation of scripture that the South African Roman Dutch Church (which was the official church of the state in Apartheid South Africa) sought to justify and rationalise the support it willingly gave to the evil of Apartheid and white minority rule.

Outside of that, sex or marriage across racial lines was a criminal offence and those who violated this were sent to jail, whilst their offspring were treated with nothing but contempt and regarded as nothing but products of “a corrupt, ungodly and illegal sexual union” and “evidence of a break-down in law and order and societal values!”

Forgive me, but is this not utter madness? Is it not unadulterated wickedness? Is it not callous? Is it not inexplicable? Is it not unbelievable?

Can Apartheid not be legitimately regarded as being spawned from the pit of hell?

Is it not a marvel that some white South Africans still yearn for those days and that a man like Errol Musk, Elon Musk’s father, can say “black people in South Africa were better off during Apartheid than they are today”!

That is the level of hatred and oppression that the Bantus were subjected to and Musk’s comments represents the level of delusion that their Afrikaner masters once suffered from and, in the case of a few of them, are still suffering from today.

How can any race be invaded, overwhelmed, stripped of all they had, including their dignity, history, language and identity, and be subjugated to this extent and come out of it unaffected and whole?

How can they be treated like that for hundreds of years by a group of callous and cruel European settlers and conquerors that literally came over and forcefully imposed their will on them and stole their land with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in Table Bay (Cape Town) in 1652, and not be badly traumatised till today.

Many forget that black South Africans only won their freedom and independence 32 years ago and up until today they are still suffering from total and complete economic bondage, because the wealth of the nation is still concentrated and trapped in the hands of a tiny white minority.

This is what has led to so much frustration, resentment, anger and bitterness amongst black South Africans, and sadly instead of resolving the issue by insisting on a more equitable degree of wealth sharing, they are targeting foreign black African nationals and venting their spleen on them.

The situation is so bad that its enemies and detractors have erroneously, unfairly and cruelly described South Africa as “a nation with a black body and a white head,” which I believe is not only completely false but also inappropriate and deeply insulting.

All this and you do not expect the majority of the black population in South Africa to suffer from a debilitating level of deep-set anger and trauma?

…I sincerely hope and pray that President Cyril Ramaphosa and the entire leadership of the government and ruling class in South Africa retrace their steps, do the needful, put an end to the Xenophobia and Afrophobia that is endemic in their country and accept his wise counsel before it is too late.

Frankly I am surprised that it is not even worse.

The South African people, as hostile, violent, aggressive and annoying as some of them may be, are our African brothers and sisters, and given all they have been through they do not deserve our anger and hate but rather our compassion, sympathy, love, care, support, concern and pity.

Regardless of all, we must offer them all these things, re-build the bridge and work closely with them for the sake of our collective future.

As Reverend Martin Luther King said,

“You cannot drive out hate with hate. You can only drive out hate with love.”

Permit me to conclude this six-part series with the following.

There is an entire generation of Nigerian leaders and members of the ruling class to which I belong that dedicated their youth to resisting Apartheid and white minority rule when we were in various universities in the United Kingdom, Europe and indeed all over the world.

As students, we marched in the streets, attended rallies, joined hands with members of the Anti-Nazi League, clashed violently with members of the pro-Nazi National Front, picketed sports stadiums where South African rugby teams were playing and fought hand-to-hand combat with the pro-Apartheid gangs in the campuses, schools and streets.

We debated our enemies, wrote articles, attended rallies, delivered inspiring and passionate speeches, defied the police, broke all boundaries and, with our tightly clenched fists lifted up high, sang legendary and famous revolution songs like Gil Scott-Heron’s “Johannesburg” as we were arrested, carried away and locked up for standing up against the tyranny that our African brothers were being subjected to in far away South Africa.

The distance was no barrier and we felt the pain of our brothers as if it were ours.

That was the sacrifice we made and the price we paid.

I am talking about men like my two childhood friends and brothers, Ambassador Yusuf Tuggar and Chief Jeffrey Onyeama, both of whom were appointed Foreign Ministers of Nigeria many years later.

There were of course many others like my dear sister Senator Gbemi Saraki (who was elected to the Nigerian Senate many years later and went on to be appointed as minister of Solid Minerals); my dear sister, Honourable Temi Harriman (who was elected to the Federal House of Representatives many years later); my brother Mallam Abba Kyari (who was appointed as Chief of Staff to President Muhammadu Buhari many years later); and others who are too numerous to mention.

We paid our dues and fought a good fight.

Our dream and collective objective was the establishment of a South Africa that was free, that was rid of apartheid, that enjoyed black majority rule and that was a brother to our nation, Nigeria, and indeed to the rest of Africa.

It was a deeply emotional issue for us as it was for the black South Africans themselves and the fact of the matter is that despite the fact that they bore the brunt of the pain and trauma of the subjugation and oppression that they were subjected to, they were never alone.

We stood with them every inch of the way!

We spoke for them, fought for them and prayed for them and today we have no regrets for doing what we did.

As a matter of fact, I am sure that I speak for us all when I say, despite all we see in South Africa today, if we had to do it all over again, we would do so gladly.

Our love, like all true love, is not conditional: it is what they call ‘agape love’: a Christ-like love that stands and endures despite all the faults, weaknesses and challenges of the individual or group of individuals that it is offered to.

The South Africans are not our friends, they are our brothers.

That is why we must never allow our bridge of love and brotherhood to be burnt or our sacred and historical bond to be broken.

I close this massive six-part about 15,000 word contribution with the words of President Olusegun Obasanjo, a man who I love and revere, whose government I had the privilege and honour of serving as minister of Culture and Tourism and later minister of Aviation many years ago, and one of the few elder statesman and fathers of the African continent, who was not only there from the start but who also played perhaps the most significant role of all in the fight to liberate South Africa and Zimbabwe from the oppression and evil of Apartheid and white minority rule.

A few years ago, when President Jacob Zuma was still in office in that country, alarmed and outraged by the issue of Xenophobia and Afrophobia in South Africa, Obasanjo said the following:

“If I were President Zuma I would put a stop to the Xenophobia with a firm hand and make an example of those behind it. If South Africa cannot accommodate other African nationals on their soil then they no longer deserve to be regarded as being a leader in Africa.”

These are firm, clear, insightful and instructive words spoken by a leader and elder who has spent the last 60 years of his life fighting for the Rainbow nation and championing not just their cause but the cause of the African continent.

When elders like Baba speak, it is important that we listen and I sincerely hope and pray that President Cyril Ramaphosa and the entire leadership of the government and ruling class in South Africa retrace their steps, do the needful, put an end to the Xenophobia and Afrophobia that is endemic in their country and accept his wise counsel before it is too late.

May God lead and guide us all, may He grant us wisdom, patience and understanding and may an unbreakable bridge of mutual respect, love and understanding be rebuilt between the Republic of South Africa and the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Femi Fani-Kayode is a former Minister of Culture and Tourism, a former Minister of Aviation and the Ambassador-Designate of Nigeria to South Africa.