Some women caught up in the recent xenophobic attacks in South Africa were a pitiable sight. Frightened and exhausted after a failed bid to escape from a morbid mob, they lay naked as they resigned themselves to fate. Scandalously, some deranged young men giggled and abused them the more while recording the episode with their phones. It was about the worst video I have seen of this atrocity called xenophobic violence in some parts of South Africa.
Incidentally, the same day I saw this video, being Thursday, May 7, 2026, was the day news broke that former Aviation Minister, Femi Fani-Kayode, has been re-assigned to South-Africa as Nigeria’s High Commissioner-designate. He had earlier been posted to Germany.
Chief Femi Fani-Kayode
Over 60 other Ambassadors were posted to various countries on March 6, 2026. Senator Ita Enang, who was originally posted to South Africa, has been sent to replace Fani-Kayode in Germany. What immediately came to my mind when this news broke was that the former apartheid enclave has got its match in Fani-Kayode. I also wondered if he will defend the interests of all Nigerians, especially the Igbo.
In the recent past, he had spewed out some negative narratives against the Igbo. In a piece entitled, “The Bitter Truth about the Igbo”, published in Premium Times on August 8, 2013, Fani-Kayode denigrated one of Nigeria’s three major ethnic groups in several ways. In a divisive and condescending tone, he noted that Lagos and the Yoruba generally had much stronger historical, cultural and trading ties with the Bini, the Itsekiri, the Urhobo, the Isoko, the Hausa-Fulani, the Tapas, the Nupes and the Ijaws than with the Igbo. He added that the input of other major ethnic groups to the development of Lagos and their stake in her was far greater than that of the Igbo.
He concluded, “Lagos belongs to the Yoruba and to the Yoruba alone. ALL others that reside there are guests, though some guests are far closer to us than others. The Igbo are the least close, the most distant and the least familiar with our customs and our ways. They ought to be the last to be claiming our heritage and coveting our land and neither can they claim to have made any real input to our glaring success. For them to think otherwise is nothing but delusion.”
To tar and feather the entire Igbo for allegedly claiming the Yoruba heritage and coveting their land, among other fallacies, is worrisome. Coming from someone who will represent the whole Nigeria in a foreign land makes it more disturbing. The question remains, will this ambassador-designate truly defend the Igbo people in South Africa?
Well, in the run-up to the 2023 general election, Fani-Kayode became garrulous and vomited hate speeches that could engender ethnic and religious divisions in the country. While trying to profess his love for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and President Bola Tinubu, he made comments which were clearly caustic against some opposition figures.
For instance, he described the presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 election, Mr. Peter Obi, among other denigrating adjectives, as a mannerless (sic) dunce with low self-esteem, a strange sounding little man, a charlatan, and a modern-day walking disaster and far too low down the ladder.
He had similarly demonized some of his current masters when he was on the opposite side of the political divide. He also vowed then not to have anything to do with the APC for the rest of his life. That was when he was still with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the then ruling party. Some critics say his return to the APC shows an unstable character whose major concern appears to be what is known in this part of the world as stomach infrastructure.
This was why many Nigerians were not surprised when some online media alleged that he was rejected by the German government due to his alleged “erratic behaviour, controversial past statements, particularly his divisive ethnocentric, tribalistic, and religious fundamentalist comments in Nigeria.” The man has since debunked this allegation, saying he was the one who rejected Germany.
“I was not comfortable with Germany for a number of personal reasons and given the fact that I had lived in Europe most of my life I would prefer to go to South Africa which is a country that I had never been to and for which I have so much interest,” he explained.
In a statement he released after his redeployment to South Africa, he said he had requested the former Foreign Affairs Minister, Yusuf Tuggar, to consider redeploying him to South Africa because it’s a country after his heart. Tuggar later conveyed his request to Tinubu who graciously approved it. Fani-Kayode looks forward to serving in the Rainbow nation which he considers admirable and historically inspiring.
According to him, he prefers to serve in a country that shares some of his convictions, beliefs and values when it comes to world affairs, that has the biggest economy in Africa, that has closer ties to Nigeria and that is more proximate to his political thinking when it comes to foreign affairs and a pan African vision.
No doubt, South Africa is one country where Nigeria needs a firebrand as an ambassador. What some misguided youths in that country have done to Nigerians and fellow Black Africans in the name of xenophobia is horrible.
In the recent xenophobic attacks that started late April, for instance, several foreign nationals, including two Nigerians, have been killed. Shops were looted; vehicles and other properties were vandalized.
This has been happening over the years. In 2019, the attacks were such that angry Nigerians retaliated by attacking some South African companies in Nigeria, including MTN and Shoprite. Many Nigerians were freely evacuated from there to Nigeria, courtesy of the Air Peace Chairman, Allen Onyema. Since 1998, scores of Nigerians have been killed in South Africa in the name of xenophobia.
Fani-Kayode will likely not mince words to tell the belligerent South African youth that hardship is almost everywhere and not only in their country; that the rising unemployment and crime rates in their country are not caused by Nigerians or other Black Africans as they want the world to believe. Our envoy may, in some undiplomatic terms, give it back to them hot.
He has already started doing that. In a lengthy opinion piece titled, “To our beloved brothers in South Africa”, published in some Nigerian media on May 3, 2026, Fani-Kayode chronicled the killings, beatings, persecution, discrimination, humiliation, and intimidation that Nigerians and other African nationals are being subjected to in South Africa.
“Worse of all are the cases of wild and hostile crowds of South African males chasing and stripping African immigrant women, including Nigerians, naked in the streets, beating them to a pulp and sexually violating them in the full glare of a sea of angry, wild and depraved young men who recorded the disgusting spectacle with their telephones,” he lamented. He described the situation as bedlam, evil, wicked, cruel, and like a scene from Dante’s seventh circle of hell.
He recalled the sacrifices of many Nigerians, including himself, and the billions of dollars Nigeria spent to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule and implored the Nigerian community in South Africa to remain calm, vigilant, prayerful and rest assured that they were not alone.
As an experienced politician, Fani-Kayode usually has a way of finding his way into the ruling political party and understands the intrigues many politicians play to win elections. He will be a match to those South African politicians who allegedly instigate their citizens against foreign nationals, blaming them for the unemployment, high crime rates and hardship in their country just to win cheap political support.
He has the pedigree. He is a legal practitioner, a former minister of aviation, a former minister of culture and tourism, a former senior special assistant to President Olusegun Obasanjo on public affairs, the Sadaukin Shinkafi, the Wakilin Doka Potiskum, the Aare Ajagunla of Otun Ekiti, the Otunba of Joga Orile, and above all, an ambassador-designate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
There is another experienced Nigerian ambassador called Reno Omokri. He has similar tendencies to Fani-Kayode. He talks anyhow, and swings opinion or support from one politician to another. It was once his pastime to denigrate Tinubu and even vowed never to work with him. Today, he is the President’s man Friday. How I wish there is another country that demands some trashing like South Africa. I will recommend that he is sent to such a country instead of Mexico.
With ambassadors like him and Fani-Kayode, no country can mess with Nigeria anymore. What I’m not sure of is if they will defend the Igbo as much as they will defend other Nigerian ethnic nationalities.
Last month, some angry protesters in South Africa burnt buildings and vehicles owned by foreigners in KuGompo City under the guise that the Igbo community enthroned an Igbo King in the Eastern Cape Province. Will the Aare Ajagunla of Otun Ekiti defend Nigerians of Igbo extraction in situations like this? No need to answer the question for now.