By Iliyasu Gadu
Ilgad2009@gmail.com, 08035355706 (Texts only)
I have been to South Africa a couple of times and I must say it is a bewitchingly beautiful country. By my own reckoning, and I believe of most people, the sights and sounds of the country offers an authentic statement to the wonders of nature and nurture.
The scenic beauty of the Table Mountains where nature chiseled out a table-like feature out of the granite hard fold mountain formations of the Cape area, to the captivating southernmost tip of the African continent located at Cape Agulhas where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet revealing a spectacle where the two oceans starkly retain their colours and content at the meeting point.
Then the infrastructure and well-structured cities and settlements of quaint little towns lining the roads and highways where the visitor can pick mementoes of the abundant wild life and artifacts of fanciful things that the imagination artists can stretch.
But beyond all that beauty, South Africa has been struggling with a hideous reality that all the spin and promotional literature captured in glossy prints and television adverts have not been able to hide. This is the ugliness of the country’s apartheid past and its effects, indelibly etched on psyche of its citizens right to this day.
When Nelson Mandela led South Africa to successfully install majority rule in 1994, it was marked globally as a true ground breaking event. The sight of Mandela taking the oath of office as the first black President of South Africa signified two important things; majority rule and independence for the majority black population of the country.
Majority rule meant that for the first time black South Africans could elect and determine how the country is governed and secondly that South Africa can no longer be ambiguous about its identity as an African country like all the others in the continent. Black South Africans do not have to be ashamed calling themselves Africans as they did during apartheid having been opportune to cast off the heavy toga of statelessness and inferiority complex that hung heavy on their shoulders before other Africans.
That was the hope and expectation.
Thirty-two years after, developments in South Africa lead us to conclude that black South Africans still harbour the inferiority complex against their white Afrikaner compatriots and more intriguingly against Africans from other countries. Indeed, from the body language of South Africans and their utterances, one gets the unmistakable impression that South African blacks feel that identifying with Africa is a burden.
South Africans almost regret the assistance they got from African countries during their liberation struggle. It is a chapter South African blacks want to forget and if reminded of it, they want to write it off as no consequence. They would tell you that their victory owed mainly to their efforts and attribute very little if any, to contributions from African countries.
I was a living witness to this in Robben Island. A tour guide (who as a rule must be a former freedom fighter) who took us round the island ended the tour with appreciation and thanks to Western countries for the assistance given to South Africans in installing majority rule in the country. I could discern that this was most likely the line given to him by the company in order possibly not to offend the mainly white tourists who routinely patronize the tourist trip to Robben Island from Capetown. But along with a couple of my compatriots from Nigeria and a Ghanaian we raised a point of order and objection that African countries did more than those Western countries he mentioned.
Why is this so?
The reality is that majority rule in South Africa has yielded very puny dividends to the expectation of the black majority. The white minority still maintain a tight strangle hold on the economy. There has been little or no trickling down of the benefits of majority rule to the blacks who remain in poverty and without any hope. What is more without skills in many professions and lacking capital and zeal to start and sustain business opportunities, the black South Africans have found themselves squeezed out by Africans from the country’s economic sphere.
Between the African immigrants who control the downside of the economy and the white South Africans who control the commanding heights of the economy, the black South Africans have felt being alienated. And the black South Africans have been pouncing on African immigrants as their line of least resistance routinely venting their anger and frustration on them.
If you are an African immigrant living in South Africa even legally and productively, it should dawn on you that you are not safe in the short and long runs. With the ugly developments of last week in which thugs were seen hunting down African immigrants and assaulting them physically, looting and destroying their properties one need not be told to get out of that country before it is too late. There is a vicious socio-economic struggle going on in that country in which the growing ranks of black underclass are caught in a tight bind between the unyielding white minority owners of the economy and a largely ineffectual black elite. Both seem content to distract and redirect the anger and frustration of black South Africans against immigrants from African countries.
It has become convenient for the owners of the South African economy and the black elite to allow their poor and frustrated compatriots to attack, kill and loot the properties of African immigrants at will in the hope that the problem will be listed as an action against illegal immigration and criminality associated with it. For convenience this clearly unconscionable actions are tagged as xenophobic attacks. But in reality they mask the real issue of existential contradictions in South Africa which has remained unaddressed fundamentally and which shows all signs of not abating in the foreseeable future.
Nigerians with their visible and brash attitudes have inevitably been a prominent target of these actions. And to be honest to ourselves, it is burden we have to carry globally not just due to the admittedly bad behaviours of a minority of us, but also for being just Nigerians which in itself says a lot about perceptions about us.
Get a life, Bayo Onanuga
Reacting to a statement by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar to the effect that he (Atiku) will contest the 2027 Presidential elections, Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga responded that President Bola Tinubu ‘’must be allowed to complete his eight years like late President Buhari did.’’ His reference was to an unwritten agreement reached amongst the political elite for power rotation between the Northern and Southern parts of the country.
To the rest of Nigerians who have the constitutional right to make their choice on who becomes the President of this country in 2027, Onanuga may as well take a hike. The 1999 Constitution (as amended) reserves the right to elect the President of this country on the people. Voting for a President in Nigeria is neither a subject of an electoral college nor is it a matter of the convenience or entitlement of political individuals.
The Constitution provides for a two-term limit of 4 years each subject to the voters. It did not state that a sitting President elected at first instance of 4 years is automatically guaranteed a further 4 years whether the voters are satisfied with his performance in his first term or not.
What Nigerians expect of Onanuga as President Tinubu’s Chief Spokesman is to reel out his principal’s performance in office and thus convince us to vote him in 2027.
Iliyasu Gadu, a former Foreign Service Officer who served at the Nigerian Missions in Germany and the United Kingdom (UK), is also a columnist with Daily Trust