What Nigeria’s South Africa repatriation reveals about two giants who can’t get along
When 268 Nigerians touched down at Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos on Thursday morning, aboard an Air Peace flight from Johannesburg, the scene was familiar in ways that should embarrass both governments.
The last time this happened, in September 2019, over 600 Nigerians were flown home after a wave of xenophobic attacks devastated Nigerian-owned businesses across South Africa. Reprisals followed in Lagos. MTN and Shoprite shuttered their Nigerian branches. South Africa temporarily closed its High Commission. Diplomats on both sides issued solemn statements about the “bonds of friendship and solidarity” between Africa’s two largest economies, and promised to do better. Seven years later, they are doing it again.
The immediate cause of this latest crisis is a renewed wave of anti-immigrant protests, organised by groups including Operation Dudula and March for March, that swept through Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Durban from late April. Foreign nationals found their shops looted, their families threatened, and local police conspicuously absent. Nigeria’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu, did not mince words. “Our citizens are being harassed. Their properties are being looted. Criminal actions are being perpetrated, and the police refuse to do anything.”
More than 1,000 Nigerians registered for voluntary repatriation. President Bola Tinubu approved five evacuation flights and ordered crisis response units established inside Nigeria’s consulate in Johannesburg and its mission in Pretoria. The House of Representatives recommended suspending business permits for South African companies operating in Nigeria.
The relationship between Nigeria and South Africa is, on paper, one of the most consequential on the continent. Bilateral trade reached an estimated $2.16 billion in 2025. South African exports to Nigeria; vehicles, chemicals, agricultural products, grew by roughly 24 percent between 2023 and 2025.
South Africa depends on Nigerian crude oil for energy security; Nigeria depends on South African corporate infrastructure for everything from mobile data to retail.
Yet this economic intimacy has produced almost no political buffer. When Nigerian citizens are attacked in Johannesburg, South African businesses in Lagos face mob justice. When Abuja threatens sanctions, the companies most exposed are the ones employing tens of thousands of Nigerians. Any serious retaliation would wound Nigeria as much as South Africa. Both governments know this, which is partly why the threats are never carried out, and partly why the cycle continues.
In July 2024, less than two years ago, the foreign ministers of both countries met on the sidelines of an African Union meeting in Accra. They “reaffirmed the existing strong historical bilateral relations,” committed to deeper cooperation, and pledged to finalise preparations for an upcoming session of their Bi-National Commission. There is no public record that the commission met. The xenophobic attacks began four months later.
This might be the sharpest indictment. That it is not the attacks themselves, not the repatriation flights, but the gap between the diplomatic machinery that exists on paper and the reality on the ground. The two governments have a framework. They have a chamber of commerce. They have bilateral investment treaties and joint communiqués. What they apparently do not have is the political will, to make the protection of Nigerian citizens in South Africa a genuine condition of the relationship, with consequences attached.
