South Africa Tells Ambassadors How To Respond To Questions On Xenophobia

South African Ambassadors in different countries have been instructed to “stick to a script” when asked about xenophobic attacks in their country.

The ambassadors were instructed to respond to questions in a specific way and relay the government’s “blanket condemnation” of recent attacks in South Africa in their respective places of assignment.

A South African newspaper, Sunday Times, reports that the diplomats were instructed to condemn the violent attacks “in the strongest possible terms” in response to the outrage from African nations to avoid “people saying what they want to and giving in to provocation”.

The newspaper reported on Sunday that President Cyril Ramaphosa plaid the same “script” when he received Ahmed Rufai Abubakar who was President Muhammadu Buhari’s special envoy to the country on the attack of Nigerians in recent xenophobic violence in the country.

Ramaphosa was said to have insisted when he met Abubakar that the recent attacks were acts of violence and not xenophobia.

The South African President was said to have “pushed back” when the envoy related President Buhari’s concerns to him, while insisting that the Nigerian Government must do something about its citizens who commit crimes and live illegally in his country.

Meanwhile, Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, had last week said some South African government officials encourage xenophobia in the country.

Onyeama was reacting to a statement by South Africa’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Naledi Pandor, who said in an interview with eNCA that Nigerians in the country mostly deal in drugs and harm its citizens.

Pandor had also asked the Nigerian Government to help South Africa rid its country of drug dealers and human traffickers from Nigeria.

“It is precisely this kind of outrageous stigmatization of a people from senior government officials that fuel xenophobia and embolden criminals,” Oyeama had responded to Pandors interview.