From Abuja to Addis: How Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa Threaten Pan-African Unity -By Jeff Okoroafor

The videos are sickening. A Ghanaian woman dragged from her shop. A Nigerian trader beaten in broad daylight. South African citizens cheering as fellow Africans are robbed and humiliated. These are not isolated incidents. They are a recurring nightmare that South Africa refuses to wake up from. Yet far too many of us, watching from Abuja, Accra, Nairobi, and Kinshasa, have treated this tragedy as someone else’s problem—a South African problem, an internal affair. It is not. The fires lit in Hillbrow and Durban today will, if left unchecked, consume the entire continental house we have spent six decades trying to build.

Last week, Nigeria announced plans to repatriate its citizens from South Africa. At least 130 Nigerians have already registered to return home voluntarily, joining over 800 Ghanaians whose government is funding mass evacuations from Johannesburg. In Durban, 400 terrified foreign nationals—Congolese, Ethiopians, Rwandans, Somalis—were herded onto buses by police as anti-migrant mobs chanted “They must go!” while women and children pressed identity documents to bus windows to prove their right to exist on South African soil. A Burundian refugee who fled a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo at the age of 12 told journalists: “I have the papers to be here. But every time there has been a xenophobic upheaval, I have been a victim. In 2012, I was shot in the head and nearly died. A few years later, I was stabbed by a mob. I fled a war in my country, yet I cannot find peace in South Africa.” Let that sink in. A man who survived a war only to be shot in the head and stabbed by mobs in the nation that calls itself Africa’s rainbow. This is not governance failure. This is a moral abyss.

The diplomatic consequences are already cascading. Ghana summoned South Africa’s acting high commissioner for a formal démarche over “continuous xenophobic attacks on Ghanaians and other Africans.” Nigeria demanded full investigations, autopsy reports, and prosecutorial action over the deaths of two Nigerian citizens allegedly assaulted by security officials. Somalia issued a security alert urging its citizens to avoid public spaces and keep businesses closed during periods of heightened tension. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights expressed grave concern, the United Nations condemned what it called “criminal acts perpetrated by individuals inciting violence,” and even the African Union is under mounting pressure to convene an emergency session.

And yet the violence continues. Groups such as March and March and Operation Dudula have intensified campaigns, setting a June 30 deadline for undocumented foreigners to leave the country—an ultimatum that carries no legal weight but plenty of terror. In Estcourt, a local mayor reportedly shut down businesses owned by African migrants, handed the keys to local residents, and ordered foreign nationals to vacate the area within 21 days. Ghana’s High Commissioner confirmed that at least 25 Ghanaian-owned businesses were seized, with Nigerian and Angolan diplomats also reporting their citizens among the victims. This is not vigilantism. This is ethnic cleansing by administrative decree.

The Betrayal of Pan-Africanism

What makes this unbearable is not merely the violence—it is the historical betrayal. South Africa’s freedom was not purchased solely with South African blood. It was a continental project, financed by the sweat of Nigerian labourers, shielded by Ghanaian diplomatic passports when ANC leaders were stateless, trained in camps in Tanzania, Zambia, and Ethiopia, and sustained through decades by frontline states that endured South African military raids and economic sabotage for the crime of sheltering freedom fighters. Ghana’s Foreign Minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, captured the pain precisely: “These developments are most depressing because as Africans, we all know the role we played in assisting South Africa to defeat the apartheid regime.” He described the attacks as “naked hatred” and “baseless xenophobia,” a “betrayal of African unity.” A betrayal. That is the word. And it is the correct word.

During apartheid, leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere declared that Africa’s liberation was indivisible. Nelson Mandela, in his memoir Long Walk to Freedom, acknowledged Ghana’s singular contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle. Today, the descendants of those who provided sanctuary watch their own children being dragged from shops and beaten in the streets of a “free” South Africa. To attack a Ghanaian, a Nigerian, or a Zimbabwean in Soweto is to attack the descendant of the people who made Soweto’s liberation possible. South Africa is desecrating its own moral foundations.

The Economic Reckoning That Waits

Beyond the moral catastrophe lies a cold economic reality. South Africa is not an island. It exports over R800 billion—approximately $45 billion—worth of goods to the rest of Africa annually, from mining equipment to manufactured products, chemicals to agricultural produce. Nigerian lawmakers, led by Senator Adams Oshiomhole, have already called for the revocation of operating licences of South African companies such as MTN and DStv, or even the nationalisation of South African-owned assets. “When a country, for the first time, kills Nigerians, they got away with it. Second time, they riot, they kill Nigerians, they got away with it. Third time, they kill Nigerians, they got away with it,” Oshiomhole declared. “Is human economy, weight, or foreign investor, foreign dollar more important than the life of a Nigerian?” While Senate President Godswill Akpabio has wisely resisted economic retaliation for now, citing the need for diplomatic engagement, the pressure is building, and patience is not infinite.

If just five African nations decided to retaliate by banning South African imports—a plausible scenario given the outrage in Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere—the Johannesburg Stock Exchange would plunge, the rand would collapse, and hundreds of thousands of South African jobs would vanish overnight. That is not speculation; it is basic trade economics. And the damage would not stop at goods. Hundreds of thousands of South African citizens live, work, and thrive across the continent—professionals in Nairobi, traders in Accra, students in Kigali. If African nations decided to expel them in retaliation, South Africa would suddenly face a mass return of its own people needing housing, jobs, healthcare, and schools. An already fragile economy would break.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)—our most ambitious economic integration initiative, designed to create a single market of 1.3 billion people worth $3.4 trillion—cannot succeed when African nationals are treated as outsiders in fellow African countries. The World Bank projects that effective AfCFTA implementation could lift 30 million people out of extreme poverty by 2035. But xenophobia acts as an invisible trade barrier that threatens the entire edifice of continental integration. As AfCFTA policy analysts have warned, “no continental market can function effectively when African nationals are treated as outsiders in fellow African countries.”

The Retaliation That History Would Not Forgive

We must speak plainly about the risk of retaliation. Already, voices across the continent are calling for tit-for-tat measures. Ghana’s government has wisely warned its citizens against reprisal attacks on South Africans living in Ghana, with Foreign Minister Ablakwa assuring that Ghana will not tolerate such actions. But the restraint shown by Accra and Abuja is not guaranteed to hold if the violence continues. Professor Daniel Dramani Kipo of the University of Ghana cautioned that “it’s against the continental unity that we are looking for,” but acknowledged that the patience of ordinary Africans is wearing thin.

The Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE) in Nigeria has opposed retaliatory measures, warning they would be “inappropriate, disproportionate, and counterproductive” and could “damage longstanding bilateral relations, weaken investor confidence, and undermine the broader objective of African economic integration.” The CPPE is right. Retaliation would hurt Nigerian workers, suppliers, and consumers who depend on South African businesses for their livelihoods. But the moral calculus cannot be one-sided: South Africa cannot demand that other African nations protect its economic interests while its own citizens burn the businesses of fellow Africans and its local officials seize foreign-owned shops and hand them to locals.

We are told that these attacks are the work of “a few criminals,” not reflective of official South African government policy. This is a dangerous half-truth. Yes, President Cyril Ramaphosa has condemned the violence, and South Africa’s constitution guarantees the rights of all persons regardless of nationality. But when local mayors use state power to seize foreign-owned businesses and set deportation deadlines; when police stand by as mobs go door-to-door demanding that undocumented foreigners leave by June 30; when anti-immigrant rhetoric is openly embraced by political parties seeking votes ahead of local elections—then the line between “non-state actors” and state complicity becomes a distinction without a difference.

We Are One, or We Are Nothing

Here is the hard truth that South Africa’s xenophobic mobs—and, frankly, all of us who treat this as a distant spectacle—refuse to face: other Africans are not the problem. They are the solution. A Ghanaian shopkeeper selling rice in Soweto did not create South Africa’s housing crisis. A Zimbabwean teacher in Limpopo did not crash the rand. A Malawian nurse in Pretoria did not design the broken energy grid. These fellow Africans are not the disease; they are scapegoats for a political class that has run out of ideas.

South Africa’s unemployment rate, officially at 32% with youth unemployment the highest in the world, is a catastrophic failure of domestic policy, not a consequence of immigration. Foreign nationals represent a small fraction of the population—roughly 3.9% to 5.1%—and their contribution to the economy through entrepreneurship, labour, and consumption is disproportionately positive. Migrants often bring skills, start businesses, and create employment that complements rather than competes with local capacity. Driving them away through violence weakens, rather than strengthens, South Africa’s economic potential.

But the argument for unity transcends economics. It is spiritual. It is ancestral. The borders that divide us were drawn in Berlin, not in Accra or Addis Ababa. The colonial powers who carved up our continent did so for their convenience, not ours. To now kill each other over lines drawn by foreigners is to complete the work of the coloniser. As one Ghanaian analyst observed, South Africans are “turning to other Africans—Nigerians, Malawis, Zimbabweans—and not even the Indians, not the Lebanese, not the Asians. They target Africans. It’s quite strange.” Strange indeed. The descendants of those who suffered the most brutal racial oppression in modern history have turned their rage not on the structural legacies of that oppression but on the very people who helped liberate them from it.

Building Bridges, Not Burning Them

What must be done? First, the South African government must move beyond condemnation and into enforcement. Those responsible for violence—whether street-level thugs or complicit local officials—must be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned. The African Union must establish a binding continental protocol against xenophobic violence, backed by enforceable diplomatic consequences. The AfCFTA Secretariat must work with member states to strengthen protections for cross-border traders, entrepreneurs, and workers.

Second, African governments must resist the temptation of retaliation. The Ghanaian approach—evacuating citizens while simultaneously engaging South Africa at the highest diplomatic levels, and explicitly warning against reprisals—is the correct one. Nigeria’s Senate, by rejecting Oshiomhole’s call for economic warfare in favour of a joint fact-finding and diplomatic mission, has also chosen the wiser path. But wisdom must not become inaction. If South Africa cannot protect African lives on its soil, other nations will be left with no choice but to protect their citizens by removing them—and protecting their economic interests by reconsidering the terms of bilateral trade.

Third, and most importantly, we must invest in the hard, unglamorous work of building bridges between ordinary Africans. The dream of a united Africa cannot be built through policy documents and summit handshakes alone. It requires trust between people. It requires educational exchanges that allow a young Nigerian to study in Cape Town and a young South African to intern in Lagos. It requires cultural programming that reminds us how much we share. It requires business partnerships that demonstrate mutual benefit. It requires African media to tell stories of successful integration, not just spectacular violence.

Kwame Nkrumah, the father of Pan-Africanism, once declared that “the forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed influences that keep us apart.” He was right. The colonial borders that separate us are artificial. The shared experience of exploitation, the common struggle for dignity, the collective aspiration for prosperity—these are real. When a South African mob attacks a Ghanaian shopkeeper, it is not a South African attacking a Ghanaian. It is an African attacking an African. And when that happens, all of us bleed.

Conclusion

South Africa’s xenophobia is a gun pointed inward. The continent will not absorb this pain forever. If our leaders cannot find the courage to confront this sickness—not with empty statements but with prosecutions, with policy, with moral leadership—then we will watch the slow disintegration of the Pan-African dream. And the world, watching, will conclude what our enemies have always said: that Africans are incapable of governing themselves, incapable of unity, incapable of looking beyond tribe and nation to see their shared humanity.

We are better than this. We must prove it. The Ghanaian woman dragged from her shop, the Nigerian trader beaten in broad daylight, the Burundian refugee shot in the head and stabbed by mobs—they are not foreigners. They are us. Until South Africa understands this, it will remain not the rainbow nation of Mandela’s dream but a house divided against itself. And a house divided, as Scripture warns, cannot stand.

Jeff Okoroafor is a social accountability advocate and a political commentator focused on governance, accountability, and social justice in West Africa.