by Ademola Rabiu
The wheels touched down, and history held its breath. His Excellency Chief David Oluwafemi Abdu-Lateef Fani-Kayode, Nigeria’s High Commissioner to the Republic of South Africa, with concurrent accreditation to Eswatini and Lesotho, arrived in Pretoria yesterday, Sunday, 25 October 2026, to resume office.
We at the Transformative Governance Forum congratulate him. We celebrate the arrival of a mind steeled by heritage and honed by struggle. But more than congratulations, this moment demands a charge: the sun rises tomorrow morning on a continent that has not yet learned to love itself, and the High Commissioner must get to work.
These are uncommon times in South Africa. The rainbow has curdled into something colder. Since April, a wave of anti-migrant protests has swept the major cities, and researchers now reach for a precise and painful word – Afrophobia – because the violence is directed not at the non-Black stranger, but at the Black African brother and sister from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, the DRC, Ghana, Nigeria, etc. The South African Police Service recorded 123 incidents of protest, intimidation, harassment, and violence against foreign nationals in April and May alone. Nigerians have been and are being evacuated.
There is a terrible philosophical irony here: the children of liberation, born of a struggle against a system that sorted humanity by pigment, now turn their rage upon those who share their pigment. This is while the non-Black illegal migrants, strangely, escape the mob’s gaze. The oppressor’s map is inherited even by the oppressed. The scapegoat is always the one who looks most like the wounded.
And yet, memory is a debt that cannot be defaulted upon. When apartheid’s night was at its darkest, Nigeria did not look away. Mandela himself acknowledged that Nigeria’s support for the anti-apartheid movement was second to none; Nigeria provided scholarships, financial support, and diplomatic backing for ANC exiles.
Nigerian passports were issued to freedom fighters so they could cross borders; Nigeria boycotted the 1976 Olympic Games to protest apartheid; and when Mandela was sentenced to death, Nigeria appealed to Pretoria – jail him, but do not kill him. The figures are almost mythological in their scale: billions of dollars in today’s value, a nation’s treasure poured into the liberation of a people who were not its own.
And when Mandela walked free, one of his first acts was to come to Lagos and Abuja – not on a diplomatic tour, but to say thank you. That is the nostalgia. That is the hope that once was. The expectation was that a free South Africa would be the engine of a free Africa, that Ubuntu would be policy and not merely poetry. Into this fractured inheritance walks Chief Femi Fani-Kayode.
He is not a mere diplomat dispatched to manage a crisis; he is a philosopher of history sent to remind a forgetful nation of its own soul.
His intellectual capacity is not in question. He read law at Cambridge, as his grandfather and father did before him; his great-grandfather was one of the earliest Nigerians educated in England. He is a product of a noble lineage that understood education as a weapon for the collective, not an ornament for the self. But intellect alone would be insufficient. Because what is required in Pretoria today is courage, the kind of courage that speaks truth to power without calculating the cost.
Thankfully, His Excellency’s courage is as renowned as his intellectual prowess. And Chief Fani-Kayode’s pen, it has been said, is sharp enough to slice a mahogany tree in two. That sharpness must now be deployed not in the service of partisan theatre, but in the defence of the vulnerable Nigerian traders in Johannesburg, the undocumented workers in Pretoria, the students in Cape Town, the church leaders and workers in Joburg.
He has been a Minister, a presidential aide, a survivor of the trenches of Nigerian politics. He knows how power works, and he knows how to confront it.
His fearlessness is not the recklessness of a man with nothing to lose; it is the resolve of a man who knows who he is and whose he is.
Your Excellency, the work begins tomorrow morning. Do not be content with the ceremonial presentation of credentials. Present something more: the moral credentials of a nation that stood with South Africa when standing was costly. Remind your hosts, with grace and not with grievance, that the blood of Pan-African solidarity is thicker than the temporary passions of electoral scapegoating.
But also hold up the mirror. Nigeria must call upon its own citizens to respect South African law, to reject criminality, to be ambassadors and not parasites. The bridge of love, trust, and fraternity must be rebuilt from both ends.
Philosophically, the task is nothing less than this:
to persuade a nation that the stranger is not a threat but a mirror; that a liberation which turns its back on the liberated is not liberation but a change of jailers; that Ubuntu is not a slogan but an ontology – I am because you are, and if you are not, I am diminished.
South Africa’s municipal elections loom on 4 November, and the temptation to scapegoat will intensify. The High Commissioner must ensure that Nigeria is not a convenient enemy but an inconvenient friend – a friend who remembers, who warns, who protects, and who still believes in the unfinished project of African brotherhood.
History is watching. The ancestors are watching. Mandela’s spirit, which once walked the streets of Lagos in gratitude, is watching. Go forth, Chief Fani-Kayode, proud son of the Balogun of the Source. Represent Nigeria exceedingly well. And get to work.
Issued by:
Strategic Communications Directorate, Transformative Governance Forum
www.tgf.org.ng
Abuja, 26 October 2026
