By Adetutu Folasade-Koyi
Presiding Bishop of Maranatha Lord Cometh Ministries in Ibadan, Oyo State, Samuel1 Alawode, said, yesterday, that South Africans have forgotten Nigerian’s sacrifice and role in ending apartheid.
Bishop Alawode told Daily Sun, at the weekend, that South Africans should remember that Nigeria sacrificed everything, including deployment of resources, to identify with that country during apartheid and should not be repaid with xenophobic attacks. The cleric recalled Nigeria’s role in South Africa’s freedom, culminating in the establishment of the Southern Africa Relief Fund (SARF), in the 1970s, with the aim of bringing relief to victims of the apartheid regime.
“If this new generation of South Africans have forgotten, the military administration of General Olusegun Obasanjo contributed $3.7 million to SARF. General Obasanjo personally gave $3,000. Each member of his cabinet made personal contributions of $1,500. Civil servants and public officers contributed two percent from their monthly salary joyfully. We, who were students then, skipped lunch and made our own donation also. I remember with joy, how myself and my classmates gave our money because we love our ‘brothers’ in South Africa. We raised our fists and sang the songs of the liberation movements ‘we shall overcome one day.’” Alawode also remembers how “hundreds of South Africans benefitted from this SARF funds, having come to study in Nigeria for free. By 1995, Nigeria had spent over $61 billion to support an end to apartheid in South Africa. A quick check of the record of the South African Institute on International Affairs will confirm this. Today, how are Nigerians being being treated in South Africa? Even in the period of unstable time of military coups and counter-coups, military and civilian regime interchange, Nigeria never turned her back on South Africa. Our musicians compose songs for South Africa liberation….”
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