Some experts on international affairs, on Monday, expressed their views on the latest xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals in South-Africa in which protesters have destroyed several lives and valuable property.
Dr Olaoluwa Senayo, the Coordinator of Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Ibadan, said the abandonment of the blueprint for the development of a new South-Africa was responsible for the periodic xenophobic attacks.
Senayo, who expressed this opinion in Ibadan at an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), said the document was known as the Freedom Charter.
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The document, he said, was designed by the African National Congress (ANC) and other organisations; it presented how new South Africa would be a welfarist nation, where everything would be free for citizens.
He posited that the failure of the black political class to fulfill this promise as contained in the blueprint, made ordinary South-Africans to be disappointed and later resolved to periodic transfer of aggression to African nationals in the country.
“The expectation that fired the support for liberation in people was never met and that the late President Nelson Mandela was the only South-African leader that attempted to give them hope.
“The ordinary South-Africans are aware that there is a problem in their society, but they lack the cognitive capacity to identify where exactly the problem lies.
“The real issue is that the main sources of the economy; agriculture and mining are still in the hands of the minority white.
“Except it is redistributed, the black majority might continue to carry out aggression against citizens of other African nations,” the don said.
He posited that the population of foreign nationals in South-Africa was so small that it could not account for why there was no employment for South-Africans themselves.
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Also, an Ibadan based legal icon, Mr Adeniyi Akintola (SAN), opined that black citizens in South-Africa merely celebrated political independence without economic independence.
Akintola stated that the white minorities, who dictated the means of survival in the society also ensured that history subject was not taught in the South African schools so as to make their youths forget their past.
However, he described the reprisal attacks of some Nigerian youths on perceived South-African business interests in Nigeria as a misguided transfer of aggression, as most of the companies actually belonged to Nigerians.
The lawyer advised the Federal Government to explore other workable diplomatic options at resolving the matter with its South-African counterpart amicably. (NAN)
