By Adekeye Adebajo

Xenophobic stereotyping of Nigerians as drug-traffickers and criminals is widespread in South Africa.

When I first arrived to live in South Africa 23 years ago, a supposedly enlightened scholar repeated this stereotype unthinkingly. On a recent morning drive into Pretoria from Johannesburg, I listened to an extraordinary broadcast by prominent South African broadcaster, Clement Manyathela, on the country’s Radio 702. He unabashedly wielded these stereotypes, even as he kept unconvincingly noting that he was not talking about all Nigerians.

Manyathela started by highlighting the recent diplomatic agreement reached by South Africa and Nigeria (though he was unsure where the meeting had actually taken place), following xenophobic attacks on Nigerian and other African citizens and businesses. His main gripe appeared to be that Abuja was not doing anything or making any statements urging its citizens to respect South Africa’s laws.  But many examples abound of Nigerian officials warning their citizens to behave appropriately in their host countries.

Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, for example, visited South Africa in October 2019 following xenophobic attacks against Nigerian businesses. He publicly warned his compatriots in South Africa to follow the laws of their hosts, noting: “When you are in Rome, behave as Romans do.” Manyathela, however, lacks the basic understanding that such diplomacy is often conducted not in public, but usually in private audiences with diaspora communities.
 
He kept referring awkwardly to vigilante mobs responsible for maiming, murder, and mayhem as “anti-illegal migration marches.” In stark contrast, UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, more properly condemned these “criminal acts perpetrated by individuals inciting violence and exploiting socio-economic conditions,” before noting that “Violence, vigilantism and all forms of incitement to hatred have no place in an inclusive, democratic society.” The African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at Wits University in Johannesburg noted that, since 1994, over 935 xenophobic attacks have resulted in more than 384 deaths. Not once during his nearly one hour broadcast, did Manyathela condemn this violence, merely noting that “a few people have died, and thousands deported.”

The issue of the estimated 178,000 migrants from Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Lesotho, Nigeria, and Ghana who left South Africa out of fear for their lives and/or were deported, did not even seem to cross his mind. This clearly exposed the broadcaster’s real agenda of focusing not on Pretoria’s responsibility to protect migrants from mob violence, but instead to blame Abuja for not having taken responsibility for its own citizens. This was a rambling rant totally devoid of context, facts, or policy options.
 
Manyathela was clearly upset about what he described as Nigeria “pointing fingers” at South Africa by merely asking Pretoria to assume its legal responsibility of protecting Nigerian citizens.  In bouts of unrighteous anger, he consistently insisted that the Nigerian government must act against its own citizens. However, the furious broadcaster had no idea what exactly he wanted Abuja to do.
 
Manyathela then launched into an unhinged tirade against “certain” nameless Nigerians whom he said were involved in organised crime, illicit drug-trafficking, and financial fraud. He noted that  he had personally encountered these Nigerian drug-traffickers in crime-infested Randburg and Sunninghill.

When a caller asked him whether he had identified these criminals as Nigerian by their look or their accent, Manyathela contradicted himself by untruthfully arguing that he had not talked about just Nigerians. He also failed to tell us whether any other foreigners or South Africans were involved in this complex drug trade. It seems implausible that Nigerians would have a total monopoly over South Africa’s drug trade, and control the whole supply chain.

When a caller told the broadcaster that he had personally witnessed a South African policeman in a township taking money from drug-traffickers, Manyathela offered no reasoned response.  Even as he kept repeating that he was not “making blanket statements,” the bilious broadcaster made blatantly generalised statements not backed up by any facts. He also drew fatuous comparisons between Nigerian communities in New York, Paris, and South Africa, all intended to reinforce the image of Nigerians as global criminals. He then uttered the banal insight: “Migration is a global problem and I don’t think it’s going to be fixed by one person.”
 
The pyromaniac presenter then added fuel to a burning Afrophobic fire. His schizophrenic framing of the issue was essentially that the Nigerian government should be held accountable for the behaviour of its citizens, a point he later contradicted by conceding that Abuja had no control over the actions of its nationals in South Africa.

Manyathela was not at all interested in fundamental questions about the socio-economic root causes of  xenophobia or ways to address these profoundly multifaceted challenges. Instead, he simply threw a match into a burning inferno, effectively inviting his largely South African audience to pile on, and join his anti-Nigerian diatribe.
 
Predictably, listeners responded enthusiastically in unashamedly prejudiced tones, with many reinforcing Manyathela’s clarion call that Nigeria needed to take responsibility for its criminality. Callers complained that Nigerians were going around the world committing all sorts of crime (a phenomenon Manyathela termed a “global trend”); others bemoaned the “influx” of Nigerians  globally, citing this as “the Nigerian Problem.”

While noting that Nigerians were being deported and denied visas to the U.S., Dubai, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. Yet  others blamed African victims of violence for their predicament, attributing, without any shred of evidence,  South Africa’s increasing vigilantism to crime committed by African migrants; another condemned  Pretoria for “baby-sitting” other African countries whose citizens, he said,  committed crimes with impunity, before threatening that Somalis would be forcibly removed from townships. Yet another caller sternly warned that people should not describe South Africans as xenophobic.

Manyathela and his chorus seemed utterly oblivious of the enormous reputational damage that this xenophobia-fuelled vigilantism has done to their country’s image around the globe, with many staunch Pan-Africanists refusing to support South Africa’s Bafana Bafana during the recent football World Cup. 
 
Fortunately, a few nuanced callers highlighted videos of South African police standing aside while migrants were being attacked, while another noted that the country’s ongoing Madlanga judicial commission had exposed widespread corruption and criminality within the country’s criminal justice system, which needed to be urgently addressed.
 
Manyathela’s simplistic rant was utterly devoid of context. There was no mention of xenophobic attacks that had flared up in May, mobilised by vigilante groups like March and March and Operation Dudula. These resulted in the looting and burning of Nigerian and other African shops.

There was also no historical context provided to explain to listeners that these attacks formed part of a similar pattern over the last decade: there were xenophobic attacks against Nigerian citizens and shops in South Africa in 2017, 2019, and 2021. Furthermore, 87.6 per cent of South Africa’s prison inmates are locals, while all foreign nationals combined constitute just 12.4 per cent of the prison population, meaning that the evidence does not support the blanket criminalisation of foreigners. 
 
One would expect an experienced broadcaster like Manyathela to have done his basic research on the issues, rather than simply rousing the rabble. This shocking programme seemed, to me, more like “hate radio” than an informative discussion to contextualise and inform the public about serious social issues.

South Africa’s media is sometimes part of the problem in fuelling Afrophobia by the stereotypes it peddles about the “influx”, “floods,” and “hordes” of criminal migrants. Parts of the fourth estate are thus responsible for creating a hostile environment for African migrants through their often irresponsible and decontextualised analyses. 

Professor Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.