It will be two months since the guest house on the grounds of the Synagogue Church of All Nations collapsed, says Peter Fabricius.
Pretoria - Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe was due to travel to Nigeria on Monday with something like a diplomatic habeas corpus in his back pocket. He will want the South African bodies to be produced.
On Tuesday it will be two months since the guest house on the grounds of the Synagogue Church of All Nations collapsed, killing an estimated 81 South Africans and about 35 others.
Yet all those bodies are still in Lagos and the Nigerian authorities are refusing to hand them back. Nor, it seems, have they been able to say why they haven’t yet done so. And so it has taken the extraordinary step of President Jacob Zuma having to appoint Radebe as his special envoy to travel to Nigeria.
He will first travel to the capital Abuja on Monday, where he will meet Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan either on Monday or Tuesday. He will then travel on to Lagos to meet Lagos State Governor Babatunde Fashola.
Pretoria has been quietly fuming over the delay for several weeks and officials have blamed the delay largely on lack of co-operation, inordinate pride and suspicion on the Nigerian side. They say the Nigerian authorities prevented South African government pathologists and forensic experts participating fully in the identification of the bodies.
One can only assume that this was because they felt this might show them up as not being competent enough to do the job themselves. Eventually, Nigeria hired a private South African laboratory to match DNA samples from the dead and their relatives to try to complete the identification. That was many weeks ago, but the Nigerians have evidently not been very communicative about why the process is not complete.
There have been hints in media reports that part of the delay has been caused by the preservation of the remains in formaldehyde, which evidently complicates DNA matching.
That, in turn, seems to corroborate what some South African government officials have said, non-attributably, that the bodies have since deteriorated very badly because of inadequate refrigeration in Lagos mortuaries.
The viewing of the bodies, an important custom in the African tradition – and most of the victims seem to have been Africans – is almost certainly not going to happen.
Yet had there been full co-operation, it is hard to imagine this job would not have been done long before now. If it does turn out that the delay has been caused by petty bureaucracy and national pride, Nigeria will have perpetrated an unspeakable affront to the families of the dead, aggravating their grief.
There are going to be recriminations between governments, one suspects, once the bodies are home. Although official South African government press communications have hinted broadly at the frustration which Pretoria feels, it is evident the government is holding back. It is clearly worried that any offence to Abuja might just further delay the return of the dead South Africans.
There is likely to be a flood of off-the-record criticism of the Nigerian government appearing in South African media. Yet that criticism will probably not rise to the level of any kind of on-the-record rebuke.
South Africa is often accused of playing Big Brother on the continent. In this case it would have been better had Pretoria acted more like Big Brother, insisting on taking charge of the handling of its fallen citizens.
But, in part precisely to avoid a charge of bullying, it held back.
One hopes Radebe’s message to Jonathan and Fashola will be forthright.
* Peter Fabricius is Independent Media’s foreign editor.
Pretoria News