By Okoye Sunday
Azu Ishiekwene asks the right question, and he is right that the World Cup answered it before any of us did. The hostility Bafana Bafana met in those stadiums was not football. It was a bill arriving.
I take his question seriously and respectfully disagree with part of how it is framed, and I offer what I believe the answer is.
First, a figure worth handling carefully.
The piece reports eight verified deaths of Africans linked to xenophobic attacks since June 2026. The source appears to be the statement by Nigeria’s High Commissioner, Femi Fani-Kayode, that Bishop Taiwo Michael Fakunle and James Uchechukwu Nwankwo were the seventh and eighth Nigerians murdered in South Africa in 2026.
That is a different and larger claim: Nigerian deaths across a year, not African deaths since June. Fani-Kayode further states that more than 100 Nigerians have been killed in South Africa since 2022, over 30 of them allegedly by police or soldiers.
I raise this not to quibble. I raise it because South African officials read these pieces too, and a number that can be shown to be loose becomes the reason to dismiss everything around it. The deaths themselves are not in doubt.
Bishop Fakunle, 58, was shot at his home in Kensington, Johannesburg, on 4 September; the Nigerian Citizens Association reported two men forcing entry and firing more than seven times, with a murder docket opened at Jeppe Police Station.
Nwankwo, 48, died the next day, though accounts differ: our own Ministry of Foreign Affairs places his death in Somerset, Cape Town and attributes it to what it called gruesome interrogation techniques by South African police officers.
That divergence is where I think the piece’s framing needs to be revisited.
Ishiekwene writes of mobs roaming the streets. That is real. But if Nwankwo died in custody, then mobs are not the whole story, and treating them as the whole story is a kind of comfort.
A mob is a failure of policing. A death in custody is the state performing the violence itself, in a building, on a record, with a docket number. By the High Commissioner’s own count, more than thirty of the Nigerians killed since 2022 died at the hands of police or soldiers, and roughly half of those he counts for this year fall into the same category.
This matters for what we ask for. You cannot appeal to a state to protect people from the mob while that same state is holding the file on its own officers. Those require different remedies.
So, what shall we do about South Africa?
Not another statement. South Africa is not short of those, and this is the part I think Nigerian commentary consistently misses.
Its own High Court ruled in November 2025 that private citizens have no authority under section 41 of the Immigration Act to demand documents from anyone. It issued an interdict against a movement to blockade clinic gates. Its President wrote on 29 June 2026 that taking the law into one’s own hands is, in his words, vigilantism thinly disguised in the language of patriotism. The Zulu king appealed against attacks on foreign nationals, reversing the role his predecessor’s remarks played in 2015.
South Africa has seen this clearly and said so at the highest levels. What has failed is not perception. It is consequence.
Fani-Kayode’s sharpest complaint is not about the killings. Despite everything Nigeria has raised, nobody has been arrested, detained, prosecuted or brought to justice. Test that against the record. Ernesto Nhamuave was beaten, stabbed and burned alive at Ramaphosa settlement in May 2008; the photograph went around the world; no one was ever convicted.
Emmanuel Sithole was stabbed in Alexandra in 2015 while a photographer recorded every frame. Mido Macia was dragged behind a police van in Daveyton in 2013, and his officers were convicted, which is precisely why we remember his name as the exception.
Eighteen years, and the rule has not changed.
