By Melvin Tejan Mansaray
In a rare moves, West African Lawmakers have registered dismay over violent attacks against their citizens living in South Africa prompting an urgent investigation and recommendations.
It could be recalled that the last few weeks have witnessed grave attacks on Africans mostly Nigerians and Ghanaians living in South fueled by anti migrant movements and sentiments such as Operation Dudula.
In a touching presentation titled:
“West African lives, dignity, and the imperative of integration: accountability, justice and free movement, and regional security,” Hon. George Kweku Ricketts-Hagan, Third Deputy Speaker of the ECOWAS Parliament and Leader of the Ghanaian Delegation said:
“The xenophobic violence engulfing South Africa – Across KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Cape Town, and Pretoria, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Ethiopians, and other African nationals have been attacked, looted, displaced, and killed.”
He noted that the Nigerian Consulate in Johannesburg confirmed the deaths of two citizens — Amaramiro Emmanuel and Ekpenyong Andrew.
He reported that an Ethiopian national was shot dead at a busy intersection, and the killing was captured on CCTV.
Hon. George pointed out that:
“Ghanaian shops have been shuttered under threat. Vigilante groups have stopped people outside hospitals and schools to demand documents. Footage of foreign nationals being beaten and subjected to verbal assault has circulated on every screen across this continent.”
He explained that Ghana’s Foreign Minister, the Honourable Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, summoned South Africa’s Acting High Commissioner in Accra over a documented incident in which a Ghanaian legal resident was confronted and told — to leave and ‘fix his country.’
Hon. George said:
“Nigeria similarly summoned South Africa’s envoy in Abuja. The Nigerians in Diaspora Commission declared on the twenty-ninth of April that the situation is deteriorating and earlier engagements have not yielded calm. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has formally deplored the attacks. And on the first of May, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema asked his own compatriots: after beating Nigerians and Ghanaians, how many jobs have you created?”
Hon. George called on the Speaker and Community Parliamentarians to address directly the intervention of President Cyril Ramaphosa in his keynote address at the 2026 Freedom Day National Celebrations in Bloemfontein on the twenty-seventh of April.
“This Parliament acknowledges that President Ramaphosa spoke. He said — and I quote the official record of the Presidency — ‘We must not allow these concerns to give rise to xenophobia, directed towards people from other African countries or any other parts of the world. Instead, we must insist that the law be upheld and enforced.”
He referenced the South African President’s comments in which he said that “We will not allow people to take the law into their own hands.”
“And he affirmed: ‘It cannot be, and it must never be, that we trample into the dust the African fellowship that made our freedom possible.”
Hon. George said that they take President Ramaphosa at his word but expressed reservations on the rhetorical framing.
“But it is precisely because we take him at his word that I say, through this forum and for the record: words delivered from a ceremonial platform do not arrest a single perpetrator,” Hon. George emphasized.
“Condemnations, however eloquent, do not bring a single attacker before a magistrate.
Calls to uphold the law ring hollow when the perpetrators of mob violence, arson, looting, assault, and murder walk free — their faces visible in videos that every African has seen.”
Hon. George recalled that on the same Freedom Day speech, President Ramaphosa described African nationals as “guests whose welcome is conditional on respect for South African laws”.
“That framing — however unintentionally — provides militant groups with a grammar of conditional hospitality that they have readily translated into a licence for violence.
A government cannot simultaneously condemn mob justice and deploy the language that mobs use to justify their actions.
My personal statement to this House, Mr Speaker, is this: South Africa must move from speeches to action.
The South African Police Service, the National Prosecuting Authority, and the Independent Police Investigative Directorate must investigate every documented incident.
Social media has provided an abundance of documentation.
The perpetrators — many of whose faces are known — must be identified, arrested, charged, and prosecuted to conviction, without fear or favour, without selectivity, and without impunity. Not some of them. All of them.
South Africa was liberated by African solidarity. Frontline States bore enormous costs — economic, political, and military — to bring apartheid to its knees.
West African nations stood with the liberation movement for decades.
To repay that solidarity with mob violence against African nationals is a betrayal — not only of the victims, but of every African who sacrificed so that South Africa could be free.”
Hon. George’s lamentation was shared by other lawmakers and the Speaker of the ECOWAS Parliament, H.E. Hon Hadja Memounatou Ibrahima in her ruling committed this concern to the Committee on Political Affairs, Peace , Security and African Peer Review Mechanism to investigate and come up with recommendations to address the matter.
