The loose tongues of the Adebayo ilk have, while enjoying their host country, begun to demonise South Africa as xenophobic, writes Themba Sono.
Bishop Clyde Ramalaine has made an invaluable and lucid response to the polemical rant of Professor Adekeye Adebayo against former president Thabo Mbeki and South Africa at large over the "xenophobia denialism".
Regardless of the bishop’s excellent rebuttal of the professor's sophomoric analysis of Mbeki’s alleged hidden xenophobia, it remains incumbent upon South Africa's critical thinkers to challenge the modern Pharisees who are bent on giving a dog a bad name before hanging it.
Have you ever heard of Nigeria, Myanmar, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Israel, Libya and Algeria, just to name these few countries, which engaged in elaborate and extensive measures to forestall foreigners from settling in their countries, being characterised as xenophobic? Of course not.
But loose tongues of the Adebayo ilk have, while enjoying their host country, begun to demonise South Africa as xenophobic and sermonise how we should conduct ourselves to be liked by outsiders. Even the champion of the African Renaissance, yes he of Nepad and the African Peer Review Mechanism fame, Thabo Mbeki, is now seen as a xenophobe of sorts. I wonder whether former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo sees Mbeki through Adebayo’s eyes.
Adebayo, as with some of his compatriots residing here, especially those operating under the rubric of the African Diaspora Forum, together with some locals of course, seek to do to liberated South Africa what was done to apartheid South Africa: demonise the bastard before seeking its demise. But apart-
heid South Africa was a living hell;
where is the living hell of most foreigners in South Africa?
I can show Adebayo the living hell of millions of South Africans who live under very trying and tragic circumstances, in many instances as terrible as those prevailing in Nigeria. Some parts of South Africa resemble Borno State or the outskirts of Maiduguri. Mbeki is very much concerned about the impecunious state of his compatriots.
Adebayo is in fact saying that Mbeki is a closet xenophobe. He imputed to Mbeki what was never in Mbeki’s mind, sentiment or marrows. Perhaps Adebayo could smell Mbeki's xenophobia denialism just as easily as he ferreted out the xenophobia of his university colleagues in South Africa. In a truly unscientific way, Adebayo claims that through their sentiments and perceptions he could detect the xenophobia of South African academics! Even a ferret will find this next to impossible.
Fellow professors of mine in both South African and US universities, in teaching over four decades, were Nigerians, but I was never able scientifically to deduce the inner feelings and sentiments of my Nigerian colleagues one way or the other. I must assume Adebayo has superior scientific clairvoyance than most of us ordinary mortals.
Adebayo has a problem: How did he smell out his South African colleagues' xenophobia without those professors formally confiding? What were his measuring rods?
There is the likelihood that Adebayo was emboldened by that unfortunate attachment that Mbeki was carrying from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, namely Aids denialism. Adebayo in fact employs this ploy to denounce Mbeki. But this is a red herring when the issue is xenophobia denialism, which Adebayo fails to document scientifically.
Perhaps, more importantly, Adebayo has been encouraged by the noise of South African xenophiliacs, many of whom have attained their 15 seconds of fame by declaring on top of their soapboxes how anti-xenophobic they were! Be that as it may, their xenophilia is no proof of our or Mbeki’s xenophobia. It is soap-box celebrity-seeking.
Needless to say, Adebayo falsely chastises Mbeki and lectures him on how not to focus on "petty Nigerian drug dealers". Who misleads this professor that drug dealing in South Africa is a petty affair? If drug dealing is such a petty affair why did a South Gauteng High Court judge, Majake Mahasela, give Ugochukwu Eke, a Nigerian drug dealer, a 20-year prison sentence for drugging and sexually exploiting an under-age Sebokeng girl? Why are several Nigerians serving time in South African prisons for drug dealing and other crimes just like South Africans in jail in places like Panama, the US, Brazil and Thailand?
A decade ago, while serving as a parliamentarian in the Gauteng Legislature, I asked a delegation of visiting Nigerian senators what happened to convicted drug dealers in their country. In unison, they responded that such odious behaviour is rare because conviction is generally fatal in their country. But in South Africa it is not.
And here is Adebayo telling us that drug dealing is a petty offence. I know of Nigerians who were executed in places such as Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. And this stuff is a petty offence, according to Adebayo.
The professor says Mbeki is blind to the “350 deaths of foreign Africans between 2006 and 2015” committed by “scores of ordinary South Africans". Wrong, professor. Mbeki is more concerned about crime in South Africa. How could he not be when 350 foreigners are murdered by ordinary South Africans in eight years while more than 30000 South Africans are killed by their compatriots in the same period?
Adebayo is either trying to portray Mbeki or South Africans as ignorant or uncaring.
For decades I have seen many drug dealers in the US but only a minuscule number were Nigerians. Why? Because the US criminal justice system does not fool around with this scourge. Moreover, the US border control and immigration service is no joke like its South African counterpart.
It is this hopeless system that will bring tension between locals and migrants. Citizens who have lived for hundreds of years under apartheid and still languish in squalor and poverty would never be expected to welcome competitors with open arms. When people are hungry and destitute, it is not their primary concern to hug and embrace equally hungry and destitute interlopers.
In a crime-riddled society, it is always the vulnerable who are the first victims, regardless of ethnicity or origin. Once again Bishop, thank you.
* Professor Sono is an author and a former MPL in the Gauteng Legislature.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.