As the Air Peace flight P47806 touched the ground at the cargo wing of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos and raced towards the tarmac, all of the 187 Nigerians on board who have been living in South Africa and were now running for their lives started clapping in unison.
“Praise the Lord!” one of them screamed to the chorus of “Hallelujah!”
Another person raised a chorus, “Glory be to God in the highest…”
“Hallelujah!” the rest repeated again.
The song went on for three minutes before the in-flight announcement came on.
About five of them later went down on their knees, their hands raised high, eyes shut as their lips started muttering prayers of thanksgiving to whichever god they owe allegiance to.
There were a few dry eyes too.
“Are we in Nigeria now?” A five-year-old boy asked his teenage sister, Ijeoma Nwangwu.
Ijeoma, 18 years old, was born in Pretoria, South Africa, alongside her two siblings who are five and seven years old. Despite having Nigerian parents, this was their first time in Nigeria.
“It’s a really good country for hustle,” she said when asked about life in South Africa. She was a college student before leaving for Nigeria. Their parents couldn’t make the first leg of the evacuation, hence will be joining them in Lagos later.
“We also teach South Africans how to do business. Being racist is not part of life, it is breaking our heart totally. They kidnap children and they kill girls, it is not safe for us. Students are protesting too. My dad is a pastor. We have to be united. I don’t wish going back there,” she said to BusinessDay on the flight.
The Nigerian Consulate in South Africa had planned the entire evacuation in a week, announcing on its website that those who wished to leave the country should register online and come physically to the Consulate with any documentary evidence they were Nigerians.
Five days after the announcement, over 900 people have registered interest to leave, said Godwin Adama, Nigerian Consul-General to South Africa, when he met with the Air Peace evacuation team at the O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg prior to departure to Lagos. The Air Peace crew had expected to evacuate 319 passengers on the first flight on Wednesday but instead, only 187 people showed up.
One of the two pilots of the 364-capacity airplane, Captain Bamidele, announced over the speaker that everyone could disembark while wishing them “best of luck” as they faced their relatively new lives in Nigeria – their motherland.
The cabin crew in their Nigerian-themed uniform had been excellent during the entire trip back to Nigeria. One of the crew members, Precious Okonkwo, would often walk around the noisy cabin asking some of the children if they were alright.
As everyone started towards the door, the man behind this reporter asked his friend standing close by if he had someone picking him from the airport. The friend said he hadn’t reached out to anyone because the family he left behind 15 years ago in Nigeria lives somewhere southeast of the country.
“I was told we would be given N20,000 each to start with by the government,” one of the returnees told another in front of him. “That one won’t be bad, at least it is something.”
There was a welcome party at the airport. Allen Onyema, chairman of Air Peace and the man who put together a rescue mission that could cost the airline about N300 million, had come to receive the returnees with a number of immigration officers and journalists.
From the government side there was Abike Dabri-Erewa, chairman of Nigeria’s Diaspora Commission; Ebienfa Kimiebi, first secretary, Crisis Monitoring and Public Communication Division, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and his colleague Paul who were the only Nigerian government delegation on the flight from Nigeria to Johannesburg and back to Lagos.
Geoffrey Onyema, Minister of Foreign Affairs, who Kimiebi hinted was likely to be the senior government official to receive the returnees, had a more important function to attend in Botswana.
“We have nothing for them yet,” Kimiebi told BusinessDay on the flight to Johannesburg. “We may eventually be announcing something, but I am not aware of any plans to reintegrate them into society as at now. We are just happy they are back home safe.”
Dabri-Erewa, however, said the government plans to give the returnees N40,000 in recharge cards to enable them keep in contact with their loved ones at their final destination. Additionally, the Bank of Industry is willing to issue soft loans to those willing to start business.
Following renewed xenophobic attacks that targeted mostly Nigerians and other African nationals in South Africa, the Nigerian government expressed dismay and asked the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa to do something immediately.
Aliu Samuel Saheed, who has lived in South Africa for 14 years and has been trading within the Blue Street, claims the latest attacks began around the vicinity where his shop was located. He showed BusinessDay pictures of shops looted and burnt beyond recognition. In three of the pictures, he was standing in front of the shops with people staring at the ruins.
“I was at home when I received information that South African taxi drivers wanted to attack our shops because one of their members was shot dead,” he told BusinesDay. “They claimed that the person who shot the taxi driver was a Nigerian. But that’s a lie. The actual scene of the incident was four robots away from where our shops were located.”
‘Robots’ is a term people in South Africa use to describe road junctions with traffic lights.
According to Saheed the actual vicinity where the unfortunate incident happened was a territory mostly occupied by migrants from Tanzania.
“These Tanzanians called the Yaupe people are the ones driving the drug business in collusion with the South African police,” he alleged.
Some government officials and leaders in South Africa have denied that the attacks were xenophobic in nature, saying that the people are angry about rising “criminality” in the country. Former President Thabo Mbeki was reported to have said honest Nigerians were not the target of the attacks but “criminal Nigerians”.
Jude Anthony, who described himself as a musician, voice-over artist and preacher, lived in South Africa for five years and said he has nothing to show for it because of xenophobia which he claimed was instigated by rich white population in South Africa who are angry that they lost power to blacks.
“I have lost everything in South Africa, many of them (black South Africans) owe me but the police won’t do anything about it,” he said. “They know how to demand for their rights when they feel government is not paying attention to them. I think it is time that Nigerians hold their leaders accountable.”
FRANK ELEANYA
