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By Okoye Sunday
Azu Ishiekwene asks the ideal concern, and he is ideal that the World Cup addressed it before any of us did. The hostility Bafana fulfilled in those arenas was not football. 
It was an expense getting here.
I take his concern seriously and respectfully disagree with part of how it is framed, and I provide what I think the response is.
A figure worth dealing with thoroughly.
The piece reports 8 confirmed deaths of Africans connected to xenophobic attacks considering that June 2026. The source seems the declaration by Nigeria’s High Commissioner, Femi Fani-Kayode, that Bishop Taiwo Michael Fakunle and James Uchechukwu Nwankwo were the seventh and 8th Nigerians killed in South Africa in 2026.
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That is a various and bigger claim: Nigerian deaths throughout a year, not African deaths because June. Fani-Kayode even more specifies that more than 100 Nigerians have actually been eliminated in South Africa considering that 2022, over 30 of them apparently by cops or soldiers.
I raise this not to quibble. I raise it since South African authorities checked out these pieces too, and a number that can be revealed to be loose ends up being the factor to dismiss whatever around it. The deaths themselves are not in doubt.
Bishop Fakunle, 58, was contended his home in Kensington, Johannesburg, on 4 September; the Nigerian Citizens Association reported 2 males requiring entry and shooting more than 7 times, with a murder docket opened at Jeppe Police Station.
Nwankwo, 48, passed away the next day, though accounts vary: our own Ministry of Foreign Affairs positions his death in Somerset, Cape Town and associates it to what it called gruesome interrogation strategies by South African policeman.
That divergence is where I believe the piece’s framing requirements to be reviewed.
NEWSPOT NIGERIA CARTOON OF THE WEEK
Editorial Cartoon: David Olasehinde|Newspot Nigeria
Ishiekwene composes of mobs strolling the streets. That is genuine. If Nwankwo passed away in custody, then mobs are not the entire story, and treating them as the entire story is a kind of convenience.
A mob is a failure of policing. A death in custody is the state carrying out the violence itself, in a structure, on a record, with a docket number. By the High Commissioner’s own count, more than thirty of the Nigerians eliminated considering that 2022 passed away at the hands of cops or soldiers, and approximately half of those he counts for this year fall under the very same classification.
This matters for what we request for. You can not attract a state to secure individuals from the mob while that exact same state is holding the file by itself officers. Those need various treatments.
What shall we do about South Africa?
Not another declaration. South Africa is not except those, and this is the part I believe Nigerian commentary regularly misses out on.
Its own High Court ruled in November 2025 that civilians have no authority under area 41 of the Immigration Act to require files from anybody. It provided an interdict versus a motion to blockade center gates. Its President composed on 29 June 2026 that taking the law into one’s own hands is, in his words, vigilantism very finely camouflaged in the language of patriotism. The Zulu king appealed versus attacks on foreign nationals, reversing the function his predecessor’s remarks played in 2015.
South Africa has actually seen this plainly and stated so at the greatest levels. What has actually stopped working is not understanding. It is effect.
Fani-Kayode’s sharpest grievance is not about the killings. In spite of whatever Nigeria has actually raised, no one has actually been apprehended, apprehended, prosecuted or hauled into court. Test that versus the record. Ernesto Nhamuave was beaten, stabbed and burned alive at Ramaphosa settlement in May 2008; the picture walked around the world; nobody was ever founded guilty.
Emmanuel Sithole was stabbed in Alexandra in 2015 while a professional photographer taped every frame. Mido Macia was dragged behind a paddy wagon in Daveyton in 2013, and his officers were founded guilty, which is specifically why we remember his name as the exception.
Eighteen years, and the guideline has actually not altered.
The response to the concern is narrower and more difficult than diplomacy generally allows. Stop requesting for condemnations, which cost absolutely nothing and have actually been provided easily for 20 years. Request prosecutions, by name and by case number. Request the cops deaths to go to an independent body instead of to the cops. Ask South Africa to impose area 38 of its own Immigration Act versus the companies who employ undocumented employees, exactly due to the fact that they can not grumble to anybody. This arrangement has actually sat unused considering that 2002. And ask it to clear an asylum stockpile that produces the illegality being policed in the street.
Impunity is not a spin-off of this violence. It is the system. Individuals who have actually viewed 20 years of killings produce nearly no convictions have actually been taught something, and they have actually discovered it.
A fresh due date has actually been set for 30 September.
One last thing, provided as a Nigerian to a Nigerian.
Framing this as South Africa versus the continent lets the rest people off far too gently, and I presume Ishiekwene understands it.
Nigeria expelled approximately 2 million individuals in 1983, the majority of them Ghanaians, and we provided the luggage a name we still utilize. Ghana expelled Nigerians in 1969 under the Aliens Compliance Order. Uganda expelled its Asian neighborhood in 1972 and invested the following years asking to come home.
The jeering in those arenas was authentic. It was likewise a continent taking pleasure in a celebration when the regret came from another person.
None of that excuses a single death in South Africa. It does suggest the concern is not what is incorrect with South Africa. It is why every African state that has actually dealt with financial stress has actually grabbed the exact same response, and why none people has actually ever discovered it to work.
That is the book I have actually been attempting to compose, and it is why I can not compose it as an indictment of one nation.
Okoye Sunday is the author of Go Back to Your Country: The South African Dilemma, and The New Ubuntu: Africa, Migration and the Struggle to Belong
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