What shall we do about South Africa?

RIGHT OF REPLY Approximately 1,030 words Azu Ishiekwene asks the right question, and he is right that the World Cup answered it before any of us did. The hostility Bafana Bafana met in those stadiums was not football. It was a bill arriving. I take his question seriously and respectfully disagree with part of how it is framed, and I offer what I believe the answer is. First, a figure worth handling carefully. The piece reports eight verified deaths of Africans linked to xenophobic attacks since June 2026. The source appears to be the statement by Nigeria’s High Commissioner, Femi Fani-Kayode, that Bishop Taiwo Michael Fakunle and James Uchechukwu Nwankwo were the seventh and eighth Nigerians murdered in South Africa in 2026. That is a different and larger claim: Nigerian deaths across a year, not African deaths since June.

Fani-Kayode further states that more than 100 Nigerians have been killed in South Africa since 2022, over 30 of them allegedly by police or soldiers. I raise this not to quibble. I raise it because South African officials read these pieces too, and a number that can be shown to be loose becomes the reason to dismiss everything around it. The deaths themselves are not in doubt. Bishop Fakunle, 58, was shot at his home in Kensington, Johannesburg, on 4 September; the Nigerian Citizens Association reported two men forcing entry and firing more than seven times, with a murder docket opened at Jeppe Police Station. Nwankwo, 48, died the next day, though accounts differ: our own Ministry of Foreign Affairs places his death in Somerset, Cape Town, and attributes it to what it called gruesome interrogation techniques by South African police officers. That divergence is where I think the piece’s framing needs to be revisited. Ishiekwene writes of mobs roaming…