Picture a middle aged man. He has lived in South Africa for more than 18 years. His business, built from scratch, is thirteen years old and employs close to thirty south african nationals. Now imagine someone telling him to pack up and go home. Not someone, an aggressive group of people demanding he shuts his business down and returns to his home country. This man, is Nigerian and despite having legal documents available that say he can be allowed to live in South Africa and own business is one out of the many Nigerian business owners that have been caught in this rather sad reality of what tensions have arisen and marked South Africa over the past three months. The March and March protests of June 30th 2026 saw thousands of people pouring out into the streets of Johannesburg, Durban, Pretoria, and Cape Town declaring that all foreigners must leave the country. It was a typical march that, like the ones of the past, although largely peaceful, was marked by violent outbreaks, apparent hostility towards a targeted group and resulted in the looting of foreign owned businesses. When one watches the footage of that march, the instinct is to ask: why won't everyone just go home? But the reality of going home is anything but simple. What does Nigeria offer a man like that as compensation for his losses or an opportunity to rebuild what has been lost in record time? A collapsing economy. An underfunded education system riddled with strikes and poor standards for his children. A healthcare system that fails the people it was designed to serve. That man and the others like him would be returning to pretty much nothing, and everyone, including the Nigerian government, knows it.
This is the context that makes what is happening in South Africa not just a story about South African hostility towards foreigners, but a story about what African Nations, and especially Nigeria, has failed to build for its own people.
South Africa is, by the United Nations International Organization for Migration's own account, the largest recipient of immigrants on the African continent. A country whose GDP of $480 billion dwarfs many of its regional neighbours combined, whose mines and cities have drawn labour from across the region for over a century, and whose immigrants, according to the World Bank's account, have in the past, generated approximately two jobs for South African citizens for every one they occupy. Yet the country with its magnetism for foreigners has failed to let the prosperity visited upon them by guests translate into hospitality.
What has unfolded instead, across three distinct waves of violence since 2008 and with renewed force in 2026, is what has been termed xenophobia, and what UNESCO defines as "the irrational fear or dislike of people from different countries or cultures, resulting in discrimination and social exclusion". Naming what is ongoing in South Africa matters because it closes an escape route for anyone who might argue that this is really about crime, or economics, or law enforcement, and not about who gets to belong. As PMC has reported, "isolated and vulnerable, migrant-owned businesses on the country's mean streets have become targets of xenophobic violence, destroying livelihoods and increasing food insecurity in major cities for migrants and their customers in the process." One can deduce then that what is happening in South Africa is fear organized into violence, and it has been the usual culprit in murder of innocent aliens for the better part of two decades.
At the core of these movements are South Africans strongly insisting that all foreigners return to their countries, with the official position being that the problem is undocumented migrants who contribute to unemployment and place pressure on public services. But the patterns that follow nearly every attack tell a different story. Princess Adjei, a 33-year old Ghanaian hairdresser has lived in South Africa since she was a toddler. She speaks Zulu, did all her schooling there, has local friends but on May 18th 2026 when she fled hostile crowds that descended on Durban to protest migrants, her shop was vandalized and looted emptied by the same people who insist foreigners are the ones bringing crime into their country. This was the third time since 2008 that Princess is a target of these xenophobic attacks, She and her 14 year old son now sleep n the streets next to other migrants since without her salon, she cannot make money for rent.. If the charge against migrants is that they steal and are perpetrators of crime, one must then wonder what charge is most fitting for their own indiscretions especially in situations like this.
OpenDemocracy has documented that, "the packaging of illegal immigration as a national security threat... provides an official gloss on deeply entrenched governmental xenophobia, in which African immigrants are targets for regular harassment, rounding up and extortion by the police." Nearly a decade on, South Africa's Competition Commission, its own anti-trust regulator, produced findings suggesting that a performance gap between foreign and local small business owners had created the perception that foreigners were outcompeting locals.
Although South Africa adopted a National Action Plan to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia in 2019, only hate crimes legislation was passed into law five years later in 2024, and even now, prosecutions for xenophobic attacks remain rare, leaving perpetrators with little reason to expect consequences.
Vigilante groups, Operation Dudula and March most prominent among them, have made it clear that South Africans believe the foreigners are to be held responsible for the rising unemployment rate and the pressures on public system facilities like hospitals, educational facilities and public safety. Although they reject the word xenophobia, insisting they target only undocumented residents. Advocacy groups report, however, that verbal threats and physical assaults trail foreign nationals regardless of their legal status. In November 2025, the Gauteng High Court was compelled to issue an interdict barring Operation Dudula from blocking migrants' access to healthcare facilities and schools, after members stormed a maternity ward demanding ID documents from patients. That a court order was necessary to stop a pregnant woman from being turned away at a clinic door, and that a second court order was needed a month later because the first was ignored, says something about how little the South African government's efforts to deal with xenophobia have yielded.
The unemployment figure most often deployed in defence of the movements targeted at sending foreigners back to their country so South Africans can have the jobs and opportunities that the marchers believe is rightfully theirs is 43 percent. And while South Africa's socioeconomic conditions are near dire, and create such a desperation that becomes a real political force that motivates hatred toward those perceived to be responsible for it, researchers and economists have repeatedly found that migrants are not responsible for that figure.
Indeed xenophobia may not even be sufficient enough a word to cover the depth of malice at hand in South Africa. Writing in New African Magazine, Thebe Ikalafeng contended that what is happening should more accurately be called Afrophobia, not xenophobia. It is a term that becomes fitting the more closely one studies the recipients of these attacks. On April 27, three Ethiopian nationals were shot dead inside a Johannesburg McDonald's while having breakfast, one of at least five Ethiopians killed in the city within a single week. Police say have not established a motive, but motive almost becomes beside the point when the pattern of attacking fellow Africans going about the most ordinary business is this consistent.
Professor Rothney Tshaka of the University of South Africa has defined the distinction plainly: "The funny thing is that Greeks and Bulgarians and others come to South Africa and by virtue of their white skin are seen as contributing. The perception, wrong or right, is that they can be of some benefit, unlike the non-South African black foreigner. It is for this reason that I prefer to speak of Afrophobia instead of xenophobia." He goes on to point out the fact that no records of Greeks or Bulgarians appear in these frequent reports of targeted attacks. Significantly, in a formal address to the National Council of Provinces, President Ramaphosa himself stated: "There is no place for sexism, xenophobia, Afrophobia, or any other form of intolerance." That the head of state has named it in parliament and the violence has continued regardless is an indictment not of the word, but of the political will behind it because the Head of state names these issues in his speech but there still is no urgency in enforcing the law against these crimes especially at a time like this.
Of all the nationalities caught up in this violence, Nigerians have accumulated the most visible and most diplomatically contested grievance.
The figures are disputed in the way that figures always are when governments would rather not account for them. Official South African surveys estimated roughly 30,000 documented Nigerians in the country, while a 2023 count found over 500,000 living there as undocumented immigrants. Nigerian community organisations, specifically the Nigerian Union South Africa and the Nigerian Citizens Association South Africa, have alleged that at least 105 Nigerians have been killed in the country over seven years. In the first half of 2026 alone, over 20 were reported dead in encounters with security forces, criminal attacks, and what community groups have described as extrajudicial killings. These are statistics not documented by the South African government, they are numbers the diaspora community has had to compile themselves because official channels have either disputed the figures or remained silent.
Some people would argue that one needs far less than these experiences to know it is time to return to a country where they can exist freely, walk the streets of a city without fearing for their lives or their property.
Nigeria offers little to encourage its citizens to come back. Inflation has hovered near 16 percent through 2026, more than half the population lives below the poverty line, and the naira's collapse is sure to have erased whatever savings a returnee might bring home with them in only a matter of time. A country struggling to keep its own citizens fed and employed within its borders is poorly positioned to absorb thousands more, however urgently their lives abroad are threatened.
In response to the xenophobic, or more correctly named, the afrophobic tensions of 2026, Nigeria's federal government summoned South Africa's Acting High Commissioner. It began repatriating citizens, with five Air Peace evacuation flights carrying a total of 801 Nigerians home to Lagos by the end of June, with arrangements for additional flights still ongoing. Around 1,000 Nigerians had registered with the Nigerian consulate to be repatriated. Foreign Minister Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu stated that retaliatory measures were being considered and were "not off the table". The Nigerian police, in May 2026, issued a public warning that reprisal attacks against South African nationals or interests would not be tolerated, which is the kind of statement a government issues in a bid to contain the collective unease with which the Nigerian populace have been known to take the alarming news of xenophobic attack on their own kin.
These are two of the continent's largest economies in open confrontation over what to do with Nigerian migrants. That fact deserves to sit for a moment before the analysis continues.
One returnee interviewed by Africanews on arrival in Lagos put it simply: "Nine years ago, my first shop— the South African citizens came and broke my shop and took all my goods. They left me with nothing. I suffered for many years to start over again. Then when I succeeded about five years ago, they came back and broke my house, stole all my properties. They were even trying to kill me. I had to run away." He said this standing on the tarmac of Murtala Muhammed International Airport, having just arrived on an Air Peace evacuation flight. He would not have had to build a second time in S.A where the general atmosphere against foreigners is tense, if Nigeria's response to the 2019 attacks, chartered flights and peace talks, the same response being repeated now, had gone further: had it built, back then, a country systemically functional enough to receive its people. Had that happened, he and so many others might have rebuilt their losses here, instead of there.
The wave of xenophobic attacks this year has incidentally coincided with the 2026 FIFA World Cup. When South Africa opened the tournament against Mexico on June 11, anti-immigration sentiments had already led to three African nations evacuating their citizens from the country. Very quickly on social media, the World Cup became an avenue to express continental sentiment toward the rising xenophobic aggression, with fans from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya leading the explosive campaign for Mexico to win against South Africa.
The bitterness of this moment is difficult to appreciate without remembering how South Africa became free in the first place. When the ANC was outlawed and forced into exile, it was Tanzania's Julius Nyerere who offered sanctuary. It was Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah who turned Accra into a centre of Pan-African liberation politics. Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Angola—the frontline states—absorbed the economic burden and military retaliation that came with hosting South Africa's liberation movements, enduring cross-border raids and destabilisation because they believed apartheid was an African problem, not merely a South African one. South Africa's democracy, in other words, was not won by South Africans alone. It was secured through a continental commitment to the idea that no African people should remain oppressed.
As it is now, nearly 400 Malawian nationals are camped outside their country's consulate in Sandton, Johannesburg, sleeping on pavements, carrying bags and blankets and young children, waiting for buses their government could not fund without donations. The Malawian Consul General has stated that there were no resources available to put into their return home. They now rely on the kindness of strangers. More than 2,000 Zimbabweans spent the night of 28th june outside a Home Affairs repatriation centre in Cape Town in the rain, women with babies, waiting for travel documents. A 25-year-old Congolese asylum seeker named Leanne Sefu, who had arrived in South Africa at the age of three, said simply: "The entire world knows there is a war in Congo. Me going back feels like going back to death."
Internationally, responses to these tensions have come from bodies with no power to enforce anything more than statements of concern. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights called on South Africa to investigate the violence, hold perpetrators accountable, and ensure migrants' access to justice and protection. The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, expressed deep concern over the reported harassment, discrimination, and attacks, and reminded South Africa that its own liberation had been sustained by international and African solidarity. All of this is appropriate, but none of it will be sufficient to produce lasting change if the root causes, which are systemic in nature, are not dealt with.
The answer to why people don't simply go home is one already given. Home, for many, is the very thing they fled: A place marked by economic collapse, failing institutions, a failure of governance and leadership to deliver what citizens are owed.
South Africa's xenophobia is now everyone's problem. It is a reckoning for the entire continent. The insufficiency of buses to carry Malawians home, the Nigerian business owners who will have to make a miracle out of replicating in Nigeria the business success they built in South Africa, and the Congolese people who cannot return to a war, all of it is the direct product of governments that have failed to build countries their citizens can live in with dignity. That failure has meant that a foreign land, even a hostile one, remains a better option than the land on which they were born.
The average Nigerian family cannot sustain two or three children through a four-year private university education. Federal universities are chronically underfunded and continue to be strike-ridden. The healthcare system is nothing to write home about. The insecurity that has displaced millions in the north and the east has pushed people outward for decades. And the result is a Nigerian population in South Africa estimated in the hundreds of thousands, the majority of whom are there because Nigeria, as currently governed, has not given them a reason to stay.
Nigeria's government cannot stand at airport arrival halls receiving repatriated citizens with press releases about dignity and citizen-centred foreign policy while doing nothing to build a country those citizens would choose to live in. There is a need for a reform that is overdue and for Nigeria to take the wellbeing of its citizens into its hands.
The same is true of Malawi, of Zimbabwe, of the DRC, of every country whose citizens are sleeping on pavements in Sandton waiting for donated buses. The African Union's vision of a borderless, integrated continent cannot be built on the assumption that people will stay in unliveable places simply because those places are home. Capital moves freely across Africa's borders. The AfCFTA opens markets for goods and investment. But the protocols that would guarantee the free movement of African people have not been ratified, and in their absence, the migrant is criminalised for doing what capital does without consequence.
South Africa is the symptom of what is a bigger and far reaching problem. The failure of African governments to govern transparently, to fund their institutions, to build countries their citizens choose rather than escape, is the disease. Until that changes, people will keep leaving. Someone will keep blaming them for arriving. And the bodies will keep being counted by diaspora organisations, because official channels will continue to have nothing to say.