The debate over Nigeria’s historic support for South Africa’s liberation has taken an interesting turn, with Ikeazor Akaraiwe, SAN, dismissing criticism of the country’s estimated $60 billion contribution as misplaced.
Responding directly to Festus Adedayo, Akaraiwe argued that the funds—had they been retained—might never have benefited Nigerians at all, but instead disappeared into the country’s long-troubled system of public accountability.
In his artice Why South Africans murder Nigerians in cold blood, Festus Adedayo sugested that: [I]f Nigerian governments, from independence to 1994, had spent the estimated $60b frittered on South Africa on the future of Nigerians, their offspring would not be hibernating in South Africa today. South Africans may also jolly well still be in captivity. We owe it a duty to both ourselves and country to make Nigeria too a pleasant country, a country which, travelling out of it would be for mere sightseeing, rather than for economic liberation. The hopelessness at home and the serial plunder of our country by our own kin, the notoriety of which is a tale told in all the four corners of the globe, are reasons we weigh little in the estimation of the world. Again, the criminal lifestyles, drug-pushing and excessive self-underscore that our nationals live abroad cannot but make us objects of xenophobia.”
But Akaraiwe, SAN, insists that “If the approximately $60 (sixty) billion dollars Nigeria spent on the South African liberation had not been so utilised, the money would not have made Nigeria better. It would have been stolen.”
