COMMENTARY — GROUND VIEW NEWS There is a particular kind of arrogance that comes from a nation that has forgotten who held the door open for it. South Africa is that nation right now. And the rest of Africa is watching. In late April and early May 2026, mobs armed with machetes, clubs and spears took to the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town. Their targets were not criminals. They were not invaders. They were Nigerians running shops, Zimbabweans going to work, Ghanaians building lives. Black Africans, on African soil, being hunted by other black Africans. The Nigerian Consulate General in Johannesburg confirmed the deaths of two Nigerian citizens in the latest wave of violence. Amaramiro Emmanuel died from injuries allegedly sustained after being beaten by personnel of the South African National Defence Force on 20 April 2026. Ekpenyong Andrew was apprehended on 19 April in the Booysens area of Pretoria following an alleged altercation with Tshwane Metro Police, and his body was later found at the Pretoria Central Mortuary. Additionally, an Ethiopian national was shot dead at close range at a busy Johannesburg intersection — on camera — with no arrests made. Two men. Two families. Two lives erased in a country that would not exist as a democracy without African solidarity. Source: Nigerian Consulate General, Johannesburg — Statement by Consul-General Ninikanwa Okey-Uche, confirmed by Punch Nigeria, 3 May 2026. South Africa is the only black-led country on this continent that has organised, repeated, and deadly violence directed specifically at other black Africans. Let that sit for a moment. According to The East African, in the past ten days alone, mobs armed with clubs, machetes and spears attacked foreign nationals in the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town, with over a thousand immigrants displaced in Durban. Not once has there been a march in Nigeria targeting South Africans. Not once has a Kenyan mob set fire to a South African-owned shop. Not once have Zimbabweans — who share a border with South Africa and who were instrumental in housing ANC operatives during the liberation struggle — organised violence against South Africans living among them. Source: The East African, 'Xenophobic attacks strain South Africa's ties with African peers,' 2 May 2026. And South Africans do live among them. According to Statistics South Africa's 2022 Census data, South Africa itself hosts approximately 2.4 million foreign-born residents — about four percent of its population. That figure, widely reported by reputable outlets including The East African and Nairobi Wire, is not unusual by international standards. What is unusual is the response to it. Source: Statistics South Africa, 2022 Census; The East African, 2 May 2026. ## The Scapegoat Economy South Africa has genuine economic problems. According to Statistics South Africa's Quarterly Labour Force Survey for Q1 2025, youth aged 15 to 24 face an unemployment rate of 62.4 percent — up from 50.3 percent in 2015. The International Labour Organisation's 2024 modelled estimates place South Africa's youth unemployment rate at 60.9 percent, the second highest in the world after Djibouti, against a global average of 13.6 percent. The United Nations in South Africa reported in January 2026 that overall unemployment stands at 31.9 percent, with youth unemployment still exceeding 46 percent. Sources: Statistics South Africa, 'South Africa's Youth in the Labour Market: A Decade in Review,' Q1 2025 QLFS; ILO Modelled Estimates Database, 2024; Africa Check, January 2026; United Nations South Africa Country Team, 'Macroeconomic Trends in South Africa,' January 2026. These are real crises. But not one of them was caused by a Nigerian man selling phone accessories in Johannesburg. The cause is thirty years of governance failure, corruption, and most catastrophically, state capture. According to a peer-reviewed study published in the Thunderbird International Business Review in 2025, the total financial cost of state capture during the Zuma administration's second term alone is estimated at R1.5 trillion — equivalent to approximately US$100 billion. Former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, in a 2017 presentation at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, estimated the cost at R250 billion. Daily Maverick's detailed analysis calculated that state capture wiped out the equivalent of one third of South Africa's entire GDP. Sources: Heckel et al., 'State Capture — Institutionalised Corruption of the South African Revenue Service,' Thunderbird International Business Review, Wiley Online Library, August 2025; Daily Maverick, 'State Capture Wipes Out Third of SA's R4.9-trillion GDP,' 1 March 2019. Julius Malema, the EFF leader, dismantled the economic framing of these attacks from the stage of his own May Day rally on 1 May 2026. According to Caracal Reports, he challenged the marchers directly: after closing the shops and beating people, how many jobs have you created? He described the perpetrators plainly — unskilled people with no qualifications, claiming to protest the loss of jobs they were never qualified to hold. He went further, refusing to accept votes that require him to hate Africans. Source: Caracal Reports, 'A Fractured Freedom: Xenophobia, Power and the Unraveling of South Africa,' 3 May 2026. You cannot beat your way into employment. Looting a Nigerian man's shop does not create a single South African job. ## The Memory They Are Choosing to Lose During the apartheid era, South Africa's liberation was sustained by the African continent at enormous cost. A peer-reviewed study published in the journal Cogent Arts and Humanities by scholars at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, documents that Nigeria established the National Committee Against Apartheid as early as 1960 — the only country in the world to do so — and from 1960 to 1995 spent over US$61 billion in total support for South Africa's liberation. At the height of the struggle in the 1970s, Nigeria alone provided a US$5 million annual subvention to the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress. Nigerian civil servants and public officers donated two percent of their monthly salaries through what became known as the 'Mandela tax.' Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's second post-apartheid president, spent seven years in Nigeria between 1977 and 1984. Sources: Okoro Ukaogo et al., 'Afro-centrism as the Centerpiece of Nigeria's Foreign Policy,' Cogent Arts and Humanities, Vol. 7, 2020 (Tandfonline); Msıngi Afrika Magazine, 'Nigeria's Role in Ending Apartheid in South Afrika,' February 2022. Zimbabwe's contribution was equally concrete. According to a peer-reviewed article published in Abuad Journal of Humanities by researchers at Afe Babalola University, Zimbabwe provided territory for ANC guerrilla operations, hosted liberation movement leaders, and alongside Nigeria utilised the UN and the Organisation of African Unity to exert sustained diplomatic pressure on the apartheid regime. Ghana, under Kwame Nkrumah, provided ideological leadership and political sanctuary to exiled liberation movements. Sources: Abuad Journal of Humanities, 'Nigeria, Zimbabwe and the Struggle for Black Majority Rule,' 2022; The East African, 2 May 2026; Pulse Ghana, 'How Ghana and Nigeria Helped South Africa with Millions of Dollars in the Fight Against Apartheid,' 29 April 2026. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, in its official press release of 27 April 2026 — Freedom Day — documented the full pattern of post-apartheid xenophobic violence: the 1998 killings in Johannesburg, the August 2000 killings in Cape Town, the May 2008 nationwide attacks resulting in over 60 deaths, 1,700 injuries and 100,000 displacements, the 2009 displacement of Zimbabweans in De Doorns, the 2015 nationwide violence requiring military intervention, and the ongoing 2020s escalation driven by Operation Dudula and similar groups. On that same Freedom Day, UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the violence and reminded South Africa specifically that its freedom was built on African solidarity. Sources: African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, Official Press Release, 27 April 2026 (achpr.au.int); Nairobi Wire, 5 May 2026. ## A Word of Caution To those South Africans who support this behaviour — who cheer the marches, share the videos, and tell themselves that foreigners are the reason their country is struggling — a direct message: your anger is being harvested. The people who have actually stolen from South Africa are not selling tomatoes in a township market. According to the Zondo Commission's six-part State Capture report, over 1,438 individuals were implicated by evidence in the looting of South Africa's state-owned enterprises. Not one of them was Zimbabwean. Not one was Nigerian. Not one was Ghanaian. They were South Africans in South African boardrooms and South African government offices. Source: Zondo Commission (Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture), Six-Part Final Report, 22 June 2022; Democratic Alliance State Capture Consequences Tracker, 2022. The continent remembers. And patience is not unlimited. © 2026 Ground View News. All rights reserved.