The Nigerian police have issued a warning against reprisal attacks on South Africans. This comes after a fresh wave of xenophobic violence in South Africa, which has left several dead and many more displaced. The UK, ever the meddling schoolmarm, has urged Commonwealth unity. How predictable. How hollow.
Let us first dispense with the pieties. The British government’s call for ‘unity’ is the sort of rhetoric one expects from a nation that has long since abandoned any pretence of moral leadership. The Commonwealth is a relic, a gentleman’s club for former colonies who have outgrown their imperial masters. To invoke its name now is to wave a tattered flag over a shipwreck. The UK, after its own Brexit follies and racial tensions, is in no position to lecture anyone on harmony.
But the real story here is not British hypocrisy; it is the raw, unvarnished reality of African tribalism dressed up as nationalism. The attacks in South Africa are not random acts of thuggery. They are the desperate thrashings of a society that has failed its own people. The ANC, once a liberation movement, now presides over an economy that excludes the majority. Unemployment among black youth hovers around 60%. Inequality is worse than under apartheid. In such a cauldron, it is easy to scapegoat the outsider, the Nigerian trader, the Zimbabwean labourer.
And yet, the Nigerian response is equally troubling. The call to refrain from reprisals is a necessary brake on the cycle of violence, but it does not address the underlying rot. Nigeria, too, is a cauldron. Boko Haram, kidnapping, a currency in freefall. The government can barely protect its own citizens, let alone those abroad. To ask Nigerians to turn the other cheek is to ask them to suppress a justified fury. But fury without discipline is barbarism. The police warning is a fig leaf over a failed state.
The historical parallels are unavoidable. We have seen this before. In the 1990s, it was Rwanda. In the 2000s, it was Darfur. Each time, the international community wrings its hands and calls for unity. Each time, the blood flows. The Commonwealth, the UN, the African Union: they are all empty shells, echoing with the sound of good intentions paved to hell.
What then is to be done? The UK’s call for unity is not entirely wrong, but it is entirely inadequate. Unity requires a shared sense of purpose, a common identity that transcends tribe and nation. Africa has never had this. It was carved up by Europeans who drew lines on maps without regard for ethnicity. And now, those lines are being redrawn in blood.
The solution, if there is one, lies not in platitudes but in pain. Economic pain. Political pain. The South African government must admit that its economic model has failed and embrace radical reform. The Nigerian government must crack down on the corruption that fuels inequality. And the UK, if it wishes to be useful, must stop pretending that its colonial legacy is a source of unity and start acknowledging the damage it wrought.
Until then, the Nigerian police warning is just a bandage on a bullet wound. The cycle will continue. The reprisals will come, perhaps not today, but tomorrow. And the Commonwealth will issue another statement. And nothing will change. Because that is the nature of decline. Rome did not fall in a day. It fell inch by inch, with each act of savagery met by a shrug from the civilised world.
We are now in the African phase of that decline. And the UK, once the centre of an empire, is now just another voice in the crowd, shouting into the wind.
