Everyone is familiar with the story by now. On the 14th of March 2026, Solomon Ogbonna Ejiko was coronated as ‘Eze Ndigbo na East London’. East London (aka KuGompo City) is a city in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa.
Soon after the announcement, protesters, consisting of local citizens and anti-immigrant activists, embarked on a street march in the area.
Soon after the announcement, protesters, consisting of local citizens and anti-immigrant activists, embarked on a street march in the area. Ostensibly peaceful, it quickly degenerated into violence. At least ten vehicles were torched, and shops belonging to local citizens and some immigrants from Nigeria and other African countries were looted.
As in other incidents that have occurred surrounding the Eze Ndigbo issue, Ejiko, a wealthy local businessman, and his supporters, were adamant that they had done nothing wrong. The Eze Ndigbo title was ceremonial and was no danger to the local traditional establishment.
A traditional Chief who joined the protest spoke of how traditional institutions were undermined by the purported ‘coronation’. Many South Africans, including the city’s Mayor, saw the development as an assault on their country’s sovereignty and a violation of local custom.
A demonstration was organised outside the Nigerian High Commission in Pretoria. To calm tensions, a Nigerian diplomat came out to address the protesters. He apologised to South Africans over the whole matter, acknowledging their sense of grievance.
The Eze Ndigbo issue in East London, as in other places where it has led to reaction by local citizens, is a failure of empathy for local sensitivities. Rightly, the overarching Igbo socio-cultural group – the Ohaneze Ndigbo has announced a ban on any installation of Eze Ndigbo outside the territorial boundaries of South-Eastern Nigeria.
But it was not only Solomon Ogbonna Ejiko who goofed in this scenario. The logical premise of the widespread anti-immigrant passion and action in South Africa itself was very tenuous. Some South Africans, unemployed, living in deprived circumstances, in neighbourhoods wracked by crime and drug abuse, were looking back nostalgically to the days of Apartheid and saying life was better then.
‘At least there was law and order’.
It was an odd refrain, but it was not the only thing that was counter-intuitive about the prevalent mindset. Many ordinary citizens believed that migrants were ‘up to 60% of the population’ of South Africa, and that even though many of them were self-employed, they were somehow ‘taking the jobs of black South Africans’ and responsible for their poverty.
The actual percentage of foreigners among South Africa’s 65 million population was of the order of 5.1%, which was easily within acceptable limits worldwide, and not the ‘60%’ bandied about by activists. In the prison population for drug and other offences, 12% of inmates were foreigners, meaning that 88% were local South Africans. This did not disprove the existence of drug-dealing criminal Nigerians, but hardly painted the picture of a wholesale invasion of the land by foreign drug barons without the active participation of locals and collusion from law enforcement officers. Despite the tepid protestations of President Cyril Ramaphosa and a few prominent leaders such as firebrand Julius Malema of Economic Freedom Fighters, it has generally suited the purpose of the political establishment to go along with the projection of the failures of governance more than thirty years into Black Majority rule on foreigners.
Ebenezer Obadare is a highly regarded Nigerian-American academic. He is a Professor of Sociology and the Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for African Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C.
Writing under the title ‘South Africa’s Other Problem’, Obadare has explored the psychology underpinning xenophobia in South African citizens, and its relationship with Mr Ejiko’s ‘coronation’. He dismissed the ‘Eze Ndigbo’ as a ‘harmless non-issue’, averring, incorrectly ‘There is practically no Igbo community anywhere in the world without its own ‘King’’. He tackled the local traditional chief Prince Xhanti Sigcawu, who joined the protest against Mr Ejiko, for demanding that the South African government should deport everyone connected with the ‘coronation’, and for going on to demand that the government should scrutinise the immigration status of owners of ‘spazas’ (corner side shops). The complaint against Ejiko was merely a smokescreen for xenophobia, which was the real issue. The protesters at the Nigerian High Commission included the March and March movement – a ‘South Africa first’ group, Jacob Zuma’s MK Party, ActionSA, as well as the extremist Dudula Movement. Obadare admitted there were significant numbers of Nigerians in the police net for drug trade and other criminality.
Despite the often mystified question from Nigerians about why South Africans should be so hostile to them when Nigeria sacrificed so much for their liberation, Obadare saw the socio-political failures of the Nigerian state as the nightmare scenario that haunted South Africans in their sub-conscious, pointing the way to where their nation too appeared to be headed as a failing African state, down from being a First World nation. It was why they ‘loved to hate’ Nigerians.
There was another controversial issue he articulated – the notion that modern citizenship should be uncoupled from ‘belonging’, in a situation of ‘singular citizenship’ that made ‘indigene-ship’ of no consequence. It was a notion effectively rejected all over Africa, where the ‘tribe’ was the root of primary identity even in pluralistic nation-states. It was, Obadare averred, the reason why people who were ‘citizens’ might not be accepted as ‘indigenes’, and why South Africans referred to long-standing naturalised immigrants as ‘Visitors’.
Was the absence of the ‘singular citizenship’ the reason for South African xenophobia, and the source of failure so far of ‘modern’ statehood in Africa? Or was a connection to tribal identity a fundamental reality that the modern African nation must learn to wrap itself around to survive and thrive?
Mr Ejiko, a rich man who did not sound particularly well educated, and who has since renounced any desire to be ‘King’, must be wondering at the furore his little ceremony in East London has generated in places he never even dreamed of.
