Of course, I didn’t have an idea what it meant, but it was always there at the top of our chalkboard at the Baptist Primary School, Oke Ako Ekiti, my primary school. The one-line sentence simply read: “Apartheid is a crime against humanity.” Years later, at the AUD High School, Ikole Ekiti, Ekiti State, I understood the statement but not the implications yet. Not yet!
As I journeyed higher in life, it was hard for a young man to understand an official system which imposes segregation of all sorts against blacks in South Africa, in their own fatherland, where they had been made outcasts, a little lower than humans and at best, second-class citizens. Nigerian reggae musicians, who had turned to anti-apartheid crusaders, drummed home the import of this debasing system, strangely powered by the United States and its Western allies.
When the foremost anti-apartheid crusader, Nelson Mandela, was released after 27 years of gruesome prison experience in February 1990, essentially due to international pressure and sanctions, the icon, on an official visit to Nigeria in May of the same year, paid glowing tributes to the nation’s frontline role in the fight against the South African regime’s inhuman apartheid system.
The global freedom fighter did not forget Nigeria’s financial, material and diplomatic support to the African National Congress, including its contributions to the South African Relief Fund, created in 1976 and the ‘Mandela Tax’, a two per cent monthly salary deduction imposed on Nigerian workers while Mandela himself was still in prison, to fight the apartheid system in South Africa. Apart from providing training for the ANC military wing in Nigeria, many of its leaders took shelter in the country, schooling and working on the bill of the Federal Government.
It may interest the younger generation to know that Nigeria led about 27 African nations to boycott the Montreal Olympics in Canada in 1976 in a landmark protest against the apartheid regime. The International Olympic Committee tested the might of Nigeria by refusing to ban New Zealand from the Olympic Games as demanded after its Rugby team toured South Africa, meaning New Zealand supports apartheid.
On the eve of the opening ceremony, Nigeria led 21 other African countries to boycott the games, while other African countries joined soon after. Never mind that the Nigerian contingent was already in Montreal, ready for action.
You may wish to know that one of the reasons why Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo’s military regime nationalised British Petroleum (became African Petroleum) and Barclays Bank (Union Bank) in 1979, which was another way of forcing the UK government to end white minority rule in South Africa and Ian Smith’s Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). It was equally a protest against the UK’s planned policy to resume oil supply to apartheid South Africa.
On a broader scale, Nigeria, as the most powerful and the biggest black nation in the world (then ni o!), severed diplomatic relations with Israel because of Israel’s close diplomatic, military, and economic ties and cooperation with apartheid South Africa, which began in 1967. Giving his angry assessment of the warm rapport between Israel and the apartheid regime in South Africa, Major Gen Muhammadu Buhari, during his military era in 1984, stated, “It is inconceivable that the Jewish people, who have been victims of racial horrors and genocide, could now provide weapons of death and oppression to the apartheid regime.” Relations between Nigeria and Israel did not resume until 1992.
You may now begin to wonder why a nation that Nigeria invested so much in to ensure it was freed from white minority rule would then turn against Nigerians and other black Africans and drive them out of South Africa on illogical and unjustifiable grounds. The hatred and attacks by South Africans on Nigerians didn’t start today. Their excuses had always been based on purely economic interests like business ownership, jobs and drug trade, to the mundane like Nigerian men snatching South African women from their wrongly entitled male counterparts.
I recall that after massive attacks on Nigerians in the former apartheid enclave in 2019, the Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of Air Peace, Allen Onyema, told me that the South African government officials didn’t believe Nigeria was able to carry out its ‘threat’ to evacuate its embattled citizens from the country until an Air Peace Boeing 777 aircraft landed at the Oliver Thambo International Airport, Johannesburg, to evacuate Nigerians.
Onyema explained that the arrival of the aircraft from a country without a national carrier led to a flurry of international diplomatic shuttles, especially to the Nigerian High Commission in Pretoria, to stop the evacuation. The evacuation went ahead despite the obstacles placed against it by the South African officials.
On arrival at the Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia in August 2021, I grew two inches taller as a Nigerian when a white American told me he was highly impressed by the action of the Nigerian government in promptly evacuating its citizens from South Africa following the xenophobic attacks that happened two years earlier. Who wouldn’t?
Just like in previous attacks, the attention of the Nigerian public has always been on the inconsequential miscreants and jobless South Africans on the streets carrying out the attacks, not on the pretentious government, whose collaboration has continued to embolden the attackers.
Like similar attacks in the past, the South African government has refused to categorically condemn the recent attacks and killings, which have escalated over the past weeks. As a matter of fact, the attacks, firstly on Ghanaians and later on Nigerians, Zimbabweans and other black Africans, have lasted for over two weeks before a lame reaction from the home government, more like justifying the attacks than condemning them.
The second weak official reaction, and the final one to date, was made more than six weeks into the attacks. May I ask how many of the ignorant and ungrateful South Africans have been arrested or questioned as a result of their shameful actions against other black Africans, who shed blood and hot sweat to set them free from the clutches of slavery in their fatherland?
It is important to tell the lazy lots in South Africa that if successful governments after the Thabo Mbeki administration had invested 50 percent of what Nigeria sank into ending apartheid regime in South Africa, majority of the illiterate army employing xenophobic attacks to loot other black African businesses and killing them, would have been taken off the streets, delivered from the grip of gun violence, robbery, addiction and joblessness.
The Ghanaian government, unlike Abuja, which most likely recognised the hands and legs of the SA government in the attacks, summoned the South African High Commissioner in Accra due to the attacks on its citizens in South Africa to show its displeasure with the handling of the unfortunate situation, an embarrassment even to South Africa as a nation. The threat of sanctions against Pretoria by Nigeria, as hinted by Foreign Affairs minister, Mrs Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu, though belated and weak, is commendable.
Only a country like Nigeria watches its citizens being unjustly harassed and killed without any corresponding actions being taken. By now, the South African High Commissioner to Nigeria should have been sent back to Pretoria to send a clear signal that serial attacks on Nigerians in the former apartheid homeland and anywhere in the world under whatever guise wouldn’t be tolerated at all.
I’m sure that some of my kinsmen would want to enter such arguments as ‘it is the fault of our governments, which have serially mismanaged the affairs of our country’. I agree with you, but this scenario is not peculiar to Nigeria.
The Turks are the single highest foreign nationals in Germany. Some of the talented Turks have graduated to representing Germany’s national football teams, like Mesut Ozil, who once played for Arsenal in the Premier League. The Indian population in Canada is almost swallowing up the number of indigenous Canadians on Canadian soil. The Moroccans are the largest foreign nationals in Spain. The foreign nationals in the United Arab Emirates are more than the locals in a few of the seven federating emirates.
Nigerians in either the US, the UK or Canada are more than Nigerians in South Africa. They are not saints but had never been harassed to leave the countries or been subjected to shameful government-facilitated attacks like the scenario in an ungrateful South Africa, which should thank other Africans for setting the nation free from the captivity it found itself in for decades.
For those who think all Nigerians should live and work in Nigeria, I have some ‘bad news’ for you. It is simply not possible, nor will it ever happen, even if Nigeria becomes the most prosperous country in the world. It is a big dream to think that Nigeria’s land space will contain about 240 million people, living and working within the borders of the country, while other foreign nationals join them daily.
Human beings are not made to live in a closed-circuit environment, no matter how comfortable; they will explore, expand and wander. With all the physical, psychological and spiritual battles people fight in Nigeria every second, do you know some Americans and Europeans are relocating to (not visiting) Nigeria? Do you want to take a census of the Chinese population in Nigeria’s incredibly harsh environment?
One will, however, appeal to Nigerians not to relocate or live in another country illegally, South Africa or any other foreign land for whatever reason. Travelling or relocating to the UK, US, Canada, Australia, UAE, or any other foreign country isn’t an achievement or evidence of superiority like many people have come to believe. Opportunities abound everywhere; some environments may stifle them.
The government equally needs to be absolutely intentional about the country’s development, especially in industrial and technological advancement. Nigeria must be made safe. Industrialisation in the midst of insecurity is a disaster going everywhere to happen; a total misnomer. The government and the people must use all available resources and the willpower to eradicate terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, killer herdsmen, armed robbers and other vices that continually undermine all genuine efforts to move a nation forward.
