South African Government Was Jittery When Tinubu Directed Repatriation, Says Ambassador Ajayi

Nigeria’s Acting High Commissioner in Pretoria, Ambassador, Temitope Ajayi says the President of South Africa was a bit jittery when in April 2026, Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu directed that Nigerians in South Africa, should return, following the xenophobic attacks.

Speaking after the arrival of 258 Nigerian returnees on Air Peace flight today at Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Ajayi said “In fact, I must say that at a time in April, Mr President had directed that all the returnees should come. Mr President was put under tremendous pressure by the world leaders, even by the President of South Africa himself. He was asked to hold action on this, because of the image and the optics, the bad optics it has given to South Africa; because they don’t want Nigeria to go. The moment Nigeria made a pronouncement that we are going to repatriate our people, they were a bit jittery”

He said the returnees are Nigerian “nationals, who have decided to come back to escape the irresponsible violence that has been taking place in South Africa. I want to say that they are in good spirits. They have been looking forward to being home since we started this process.”

“Mr President started this process. Left to him, he would have wanted this to happen in April. That was when Mr. President was so agitated and he wanted his people to return to Nigeria,” Ajayi explained adding that “they put Mr. President under tremendous pressure that he should not do this but Mr. President was always very consistent, because he knew where he was going, and he said any attack on my people in South Africa is an attack on me, and you must bring my people back. So, it got to a stage, he said, he’s no longer going to listen, that we should tell all people that wanted to come, voluntarily, that showed interest in coming back, they should start coming. That was when we established what we call a coordination meeting with the South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So, we were meeting on a weekly basis, two times at a time.

So we sent notification to all the regions, for Nigerians to come forward, those that are willing to be repatriated, and I can tell you that we received a lot of interest. Going beyond that, Mr President directed the evacuation process itself.

By establishing or creating, liaising with Air Peace, and making available five different flights to carry people from South Africa back home. This is the first batch that will be coming in, and as I mentioned, there are a total of 258 returnees. So, the next batch will be coming in on Monday, which is on June 15.

The third batch will be on June 18. The fourth batch will be returning on June 22 while the fifth and the last batch will be coming in on June 24.

Mr. President has directed that all this must happen within the month of June. So in terms of the process we followed, I will discuss with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in South Africa, because they said they have to be involved in it. So we formed a coordinating unit involving the South African Foreign Ministry, the South African Home Affairs Ministry, the South African Immigration Service, the Border Management Office, as well as the Intelligence Service in South Africa.

We created a three-stage process through which they can be screened. The first is to first identify everybody through biometrics, which we carried out. Then they moved to the immigration side, which is just to take the essence of this to streamline the process at the airport, so that our people will not be put under undue pressure the day they are going.

Everything was streamlined at the mission. We carried this out, and the last thing was to issue emergency travel certificates for those who did not have; but I must say that many of these people you are seeing here, Minister, are not undocumented persons as the story went out this morning before we landed. Many of them became undocumented because of systemic failures of South African Home Service. I must say that. Some have submitted requests for the extension of their resident permits for years. It takes two years, three years, five years. Some are still lying down there. So in the process, they were caught up in this, because South African Home Service is like a transactional section and because of this delay, and the general problem in the system itself, it made many people to become undocumented. So, it is false and totally misleading for a body of officials to mention, to put it in the news before we landed, that 258 Nigerians that came were undocumented in South Africa.

I stand to disagree with that. I must say that when we started, I mentioned that we formed a coordination meeting. When we started, we established certain protocols and tnd the protocols were that we are not going to talk to the press. We are going to keep the press away from this. We all agreed to that protocol. So I wonder, before we landed, I’ve heard something sent into the press in South Africa. That’s why I’m trying to debunk this, because we all agreed to that protocol.

I don’t want them to politicize this kind of operation because it’s beyond politics. It’s not something we should take vulnerability of people to become, or to turn into spectacle, whereby the press will be feasting on it.”

The Chairman of Nigerians In Diaspora Commission, Mrs. Abike Dabiri-Erewa announced to the returnees that MTN was “going to transfer to your accounts a hundred thousand Naira each for every one of you; and that’s not all. They are going to give you N15,000 airtime, and they will also be giving you starter packs, so you can have phones to use when you get home.

Governor Hope Uzodimma said we’ll also get your account numbers, and he’s going to transfer 1 million Naira to each one of you. So again, we’ll sort that out, get your account numbers, he transfers to you.

The state governors will do more. We’ll be working with the Refugee Commission, moving on, to get all the states to do even better than Governor Uzodima has done.”

Nigeria’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Sola Enikanolaiye, who received the returnees on behalf of President Tinubu said welcomed them home, explaining that “our job is to manage relations, even under the most difficult circumstances. We believe in diplomacy. We believe in engagement. We believe in dialogue, and we are confident that in this process, we will continue to engage South Africa to ensure that our nation is given better treatment.

Going forward, there are two mechanisms already in place. For this to happen; first, you have the Bi-national Commission between the two countries which covers the entire gamut of relations.”

He said “to address this specific concern, we have the early warning mechanism that has just been put in place. I’m aware of some of the issues that have been raised with the latter but I want to assure you. We are going to activate these mechanisms so that we can respond more quickly, in a more proactive manner to situations that may occur in the future.”