Nigeria, Ghana To Confront South Africa At AU Over Afrophobia Killings

Nigeria has moved to take its long running grievance over attacks on its citizens in South Africa to the highest political table on the continent, announcing that it will join Ghana to place the matter before the next session of the African Union Assembly of Heads of State and Government.

The decision, disclosed by the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Olusola Enikanolaiye, signals a shift from quiet diplomacy to open pressure on Pretoria over a pattern of violence that has claimed dozens of Nigerian lives and shows no sign of ending.

Enikanolaiye put the human cost in stark terms. According to a statement issued by his special adviser on digital media and public diplomacy, Raphael Oni, the minister said about 90 Nigerians had been killed in Afrophobic violence since June 2022, with fresh attacks and displacement recorded in 2026. He spoke at a virtual roundtable on South Africa’s xenophobia in comparative perspective, convened by the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs.

The government’s choice of language is deliberate. Enikanolaiye argued that the violence is better described as Afrophobia than xenophobia, because it targets fellow Africans rather than foreigners in general, and carries what he called a particularly post-colonial and post-apartheid character. He described as a painful irony the fact that citizens of countries that backed South Africa’s freedom struggle are now treated as unwanted outsiders.

That history is central to Nigeria’s case. The minister said Nigeria’s financial commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle was estimated at more than 60 billion dollars, alongside the nationalisation of British Petroleum’s local assets, scholarships for South Africans and hospitality extended to their leaders. To preserve the record, he disclosed that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had directed the institute to undertake a comprehensive study documenting that support. “There is blood, sacrifice and solidarity in that history,” he said.

South Africa, however, rejects the framing. At the same forum, the South African Consul General in Lagos, Professor Bobby Moroe, dismissed the xenophobia label. He argued that isolated incidents of criminality by vigilante groups could not determine whether South Africans are xenophobic. He added that South Africa hosts about 3.9 million migrants, the largest population of foreign nationals on the continent, which he said would be impossible in a truly hostile society.

Moroe also pointed to enforcement. Weeks earlier, at a business forum in Lagos, he said South African authorities had arrested about 80 suspected members of vigilante groups across five or six provinces, insisting that only the state, and not mobs, has the legal standing to enforce immigration law.

The competing accounts sit against a documented history. South Africa has witnessed repeated waves of deadly anti-foreigner violence, including major outbreaks in 2008, 2015 and 2019, the last of which triggered reprisal attacks on South African businesses in Nigeria and a diplomatic rupture. In April 2025, two Nigerian traders were shot dead outside their shops on Church Street in Pretoria, one of several killings that hardened anger within the Nigerian community abroad.

Anti-immigrant mobilisation has also grown more organised. Groups such as Operation Dudula have campaigned to block migrants from jobs, housing and public services, and critics of Pretoria’s position, including some Nigerian political figures, have cited such activity as evidence that the problem is structural rather than incidental.

For Nigeria, the stakes reach beyond individual tragedies. The two countries anchor much of Africa’s economy and diplomacy, and recurring violence complicates trade, investment and the wider push for continental integration under the African Continental Free Trade Area. Nigeria has proposed activating existing early-warning and rapid-response mechanisms between both countries and, ultimately, reconvening the binational commission to defuse tensions before they escalate.

What is confirmed is that Nigeria has formally elevated the issue to the continental level and placed a death toll on the record. What remains unresolved is whether that pressure will change conditions on the ground, since the two governments cannot yet agree on what to call the problem, let alone how to end it. Until they do, the roughly 90 families the minister spoke of remain the clearest measure of a crisis that successive interventions have failed to stop.