The British government has raised the alarm over a wave of violence targeting foreign workers in South Africa, as Nigeria began airlifting its citizens out of the country. The Foreign Office issued a travel warning citing a “rapidly deteriorating security situation” after at least five people were killed in clashes in Johannesburg and Pretoria.
For the thousands of Nigerian traders, shopkeepers, and labourers caught in the chaos, the decision to flee has been brutal. Many have lost everything: their stock, their savings, their livelihoods. One man, speaking to me at the airport in Abuja, had been running a grocery store in Johannesburg for six years. He arrived back with nothing but a small bag. “They burnt my shop. They said we were taking their jobs,” he said.
The roots of this crisis are not new. South Africa’s unemployment rate sits at over 30 per cent, one of the highest in the world. In townships where poverty is deep and hope is thin, anger has been directed at migrants from other African nations. Politicians have stoked these fires, using language that blames foreigners for crime and economic hardship. It is a familiar story, one that has played out in countries from Kenya to the United Kingdom.
Nigeria’s swift evacuation of 300 citizens this week is a rare show of state action, but it is a sticking plaster. The underlying issue is regional inequality: a desperate scramble for work and survival that pits the poor against the even poorer. The Nigerian government has called for calm and dialogue, but the damage is done. Already, there are reports of retaliatiatory attacks against South African businesses in Nigeria.
The UK Foreign Office’s intervention is significant. It reflects a recognition that this crisis could spiral further, destabilising a key African economy and straining diplomatic relations across the continent. For now, the advice to British nationals is to avoid affected areas, but what about the millions who cannot leave? The ones stuck in hostels, crammed into informal settlements, with no embassy to call? They are the ones who will bear the brunt.
This is not a story about law and order. It is about economic failure: a country where the promise of freedom has curdled into a bitter fight for scraps. The evacuation may save a few hundred lives, but until the roots of this crisis are addressed, the violence will return. And the UK, with its own history of anti-migrant riots, knows this all too well.
