Solomon, South Africa and the Xenophobic Debacle, By Vincent Chuks Igbinedion

His name was Solomon but this writer cannot remember his surname. It was during the late 1980s when Auchi Polytechnic was gradually recovering from the neglect by the Bendel State government that then had its focus on Bendel State University, which later became Edo State University and is now Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma.

With the likes of Mike Morka, Moses Omorodion, Martins Onyijen, Onochie Osiegbu, Valentine Anidiobi, Abraham the nurse at the polytechnic health centre, as well as others whose names and faces have faded deep into memory, Solomon used to come to the Polytechnic staff quarters where he shared an atmosphere of camaraderie with other “boys’ quarter boys”. Solomon drank beer as though the green bottle was going out of circulation into irretrievable oblivion. And he did so with his popular refrain, apparently from within the horizon of self-inflicted stupor: “Nigeria good oooo”, he regularly enthused.

Nigeria good? Where was that coming from? The military was in power and all promises of democracy were being thwarted by the same government that initiated and proposed it. We got to know later, and personally got the real explanation at the auditorium of the University of Benin when a symposium was held in the build-up to the return of anti-apartheid icon, Mr Nelson Mandela. Got the drift? Solomon was from South Africa.

Born into the blistering heat of the apartheid regime, Solomon never knew what it meant to walk the streets of Pretoria, Sandton, Johannesburg, Gauteng and elsewhere without being harassed by law-enforcement agents. He never knew what it meant to associate with people without watching his back. He never saw some white or coloured people without sensing danger. He never entered a vehicle without being told that was not a means of transportation for people with his type of skin pigmentation. Neither could he enter just any eatery to eat just any food with just anybody else in the same venue. Nor could he just get into any city without keeping his ears on red alert for any sound that would remind him it was time for people with the misfortune of being born black to exit the cities.

That was the lot of Solomon. The only “sin” he committed against humanity at the time was being born black, a choice he never made himself, and being born into a geographical space where his ancestors sold off their collective patrimony to a more culturally advanced people, or were forced by brutal gunboats to relinquish and move into absurd and abhorrent epicentres where the Hobbesian theory of the shortness and brutishness of life was given physical and measurable manifestation.

To situate Solomon’s euphoria in proper perspective, it is important to state that he was on full Federal Government of Nigeria scholarship and he was getting mouth-watering monthly stipends with which he financed his regular binge with the green bottle. Upon graduation from Auchi Polytechnic, he was sent to work in Nigerian Telecommunications Limited, the defunct NITEL, which was then equivalent to being employed in the best of today’s corporate entities.

Solomon was however expected to remit a fraction of his earnings in NITEL to South Africa to help finance the anti-apartheid groups who were then confronting the obnoxious apartheid regime with a view to ending the white supremacist reign. And there were hundreds of them feeding off our patrimony, “enjoying” themselves while remitting something home to fight a war we were never part of those who ignited it in the first place.

The “war” was won when the apartheid regime under Mr Pieter W. Botha capitulated under intense local and international pressure led majorly by Nigeria to release the symbol of the struggle who had served 27 years of life imprisonment. Mr Nelson Mandela was later to become the first president of post-apartheid South Africa upon his release from prison.

History sometimes has a way of running a comic, nay cosmic, course. How else could one explain that the sons of Solomon and his apartheid regime generation are now those who have turned against Nigerians and other African brothers? Seeing Solomon then on his battle with the bottles, it was obvious that something would be missing: propagating and replicating those who will be as privileged as himself, but in his country. He forgot to prepare his offspring for the reality of the future where only the best counts and there might be no consolation prizes. Solomon failed to equip his offspring with the requisite skill set, tool set and mindset to navigate a dynamic world economic order.

And these immediate offspring of Solomon and his apartheid regime peers have been replicating themselves in multiples, and without the necessary education to prepare for a world that has no patience for the mediocre. What they have done successfully is to replicate themselves through offspring that were not exposed to the vagaries and variables of modern growth and development. So as the saying goes, “the apple does not fall far from the tree”.

The people who resisted the oppressive regime through underground and clandestine approaches have released into the earth children who still have the revolutionary bloodline lacing their DNA. The energy so generated is being directed at self-implosion to the point of self-immolation. That energy is now being directed at people that sacrificed their means and watched their countries invest heavily on the apartheid-must-end programme that consumed enormous resources. The energy is now being turned against fellow blacks with damages that are both costly and colossal for a continent that is being shrouded in myth and mystique.

Who will advise the xenophobic South African youth that if the sky falls, the damages are enormous and none may be spared? Who will advise them that no African brother or sister has taken any South African jobs? Why? Because barbing is no job. Bricklaying is no job. Motor mechanic is no job, ditto electrical repairs. Very few, if any, Nigerians work in banks and other corporate entities in South Africa. And those who work in those entities live where the South African youths cannot reach them. So, xenophobic attacks, for whatever reasons, are misplaced and misdirected.

Is it possible to still recruit Solomon to do the job of telling his compatriots the truth, or has he succeeded so much that he has become detached from the realities that became the South Africa he “fought for”?

And just last week, the Federal Government of Nigeria evacuated more than 250 xenophobia survivors from South Africa. They landed at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos at a time the South African football team, Bafana Bafana, was lacing their boots to confront co-host Mexico in the opening match of the FIFA 2026 World Cup. The team suffered a 2-0 defeat and one of the players was expressing disappointment that even Africans were supporting the Mexican team, and that contributed a great deal to their humiliating outing. Crass arrogance!!!

Solomon, please where are you? It’s been a while but if you are still around and your compatriots are within the sound of your voice, sound it loud and clear to them that patriotism has many colours and the greatest folly a man could subject himself to is to eat your cake and expect to have it tucked away somewhere.

My name is Vincent Chuks Igbinedion and I am just exploiting my privilege of thinking aloud.