Listen carefully, Pretoria.

You want Nigeria, Ethiopia and Malawi to pay you US$18.5 million for the “privilege” of repatriating our people?

Koma nde ndinu a masewela eti. Aala.

You must be joking. You must be completely out of your fricking minds.

Our people left their entire lives behind in South Africa. Their houses were broken into by marauding thugs. Their valuable belongings were stolen in broad daylight. Even their money was confiscated and pocketed. Entire lives were destroyed. People died! Families were torn apart. Trauma that no amount of money can erase.

And now your government has the sheer, staggering entitlement to write letters demanding we reimburse you for the transport costs of sending them home after they were terrorised on your soil?

Za fodya eti.

Malawi is not paying any money to South Africa for repatriation.

Zero.
Zilch.

In fact, if anything it is South Africa that should be the one writing cheques to Malawi, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria and Ethiopia.

For every house looted.
For every life lost.
For every person who returned with nothing but scars, trauma and empty hands.

Think about the children of the citizens of African countries that you have ejected, think about how they will be feeling think about how their childhoods have been violently taken away from them.

South Africa should be the one paying for the trauma inflicted on thousands of our citizens while your authorities either looked the other way or joined the chorus of “go back home.”

And if you insist, we can quantify that figure. We can itemise the losses. All the losses. We can calculate the human cost. And when we do, Pretoria will owe us – not the other way around.

Koma zauchitsiluzi mayazi.

It is pure nonsense to demand payment for something that was completely avoidable, which your authorities allowed to get out of hand, and we are not standing for it. Mxcieu.

Now, to those already lining up to say, “But many of the Africans were illegal…”

Spare us the BS.

There are illegal immigrants everywhere on this planet. The United Kingdom has hundreds of thousands of them. Hear that, hundreds of thousands. Germany has the same problem. Malawi has them too, including it must be said azungu living among us without proper papers, within Malawi. Illegality is not unique to South Africa, and it is not the central issue here.

The real issue is this: after your own domestic, short-sighted, and frankly idiotic charade of xenophobic agitation disrupted the lives of tens of thousands of people; after you failed to control and stop the thuggery, after homes were ransacked, livelihoods destroyed, and people forced to flee in fear; after all that you turn around and demand that we foot the bill for cleaning up the mess?

That is nonsense of the highest order. It is pure entitlement.
It echoes the British Raj where colonial administrators imposed punishing land taxes on Indian farmers, even as drought and famine set in. In some periods, taxes were raised rather than abolished – which would have been the humane thing to do when people were starved. Millions died. The empire counted its revenue while its subjects buried their dead.

And here let us speak plainly about the atmosphere that made this mass flight of people necessary.

People who have lived among South Africans for decades will tell you the truth without polishing it: daily bullying of other Africans in shops, at workplaces, and in ordinary public spaces is routine. The same people who loudly proclaim “ubuntu” practice something closer to its opposite when the person in front of them is from Malawi, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Mozambique or elsewhere on the continent. The internet is littered with videos of South Africans beraring, attacking and killing fellow Africans with zero shame. The hostility is not occasional. It is patterned, open, and unprecedented in its intensity toward other Black Africans.

That lived reality is what drove tens of thousands to leave everything behind, when those half dressed thugs took to the street. That is the context in which Pretoria now has the nerve to present a bill.

Now, let’s turn to history, since you seem to have developed a convenient case of selective amnesia.

During the darkest years of apartheid, when much of Africa was isolating the racist regime, Malawi did not join the boycott. Under Kamuzu Banda, we were the only Black African state to establish full diplomatic relations with Pretoria. We continued trade. We kept channels open. Malawian miners worked South African mines by the tens of thousands. South African loans built our railway and our new capital at Lilongwe.

This was not without cost. Banda faced real political and moral risk for this stance. Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda condemned him publicly. The OAU rebuked him at its 1971 summit. He was accused of betraying continental solidarity.

But the picture was more layered than the public rebukes suggested. When Mandela was released in 1990, Banda sent an unprompted financial contribution to the ANC. Relations between Malawi and the new South Africa stayed cordial afterward, helped by revelations that Banda had quietly supported the ANC even during the apartheid years. Mandela made an early visit to Malawi as president. Whatever the diplomatic noise, something real passed between these two men and their countries.

We remember the history. It’s never been forgotten.

Malawi never sent Pretoria an invoice for all the help. We never demanded reimbursement for the economic opportunities we missed, the diplomatic heat we absorbed, or the assistance we quietly provided to the ANC.

We did it because it was the right thing to do in the circumstances of the time. Because African solidarity, even imperfect, still meant something.

And now, in 2026, after your own citizens and officials created an atmosphere so hostile that tens of thousands of Malawians felt they had no choice but to flee for their lives, you have the audacity to present us with a bill? WTAF!?

With all due respect that is not governance.
That is not diplomacy. That is textbook entitlement dressed up as fiscal responsibility.

You overspent your own budget. You failed to plan for the consequences of the anti-foreigner violence that erupted on your streets. You processed over 80,000 people, including thousands of Malawians, but the solution can never be to pass the hat to the very governments whose citizens had just been driven out.

No.

Here, please let us go back again into history. Let’s consider the parallels with the end of the transatlantic slave trade. When slavery was finally abolished, some slave owners were compensated. They were paid money by governments like the British Government for the “loss of their property.” The enslaved people who had lost everything, lost their freedom, their labour, their dignity, their lives, received absolutely nothing. Till today calls for reparations continue to fall on deaf ears.

So why should the governments of people who have already lost everything, their homes, their savings, businesses, safety, and in some cases their very lives, why should they now be expected to pay the very same country that failed to protect them?

Why should Malawi, Ethiopia, or Nigeria subsidise the bill for a crisis that began with violence and hostility on South African soil?

We reject the demand in its entirety.
We reject the premise.
We reject the arrogance.

South Africa can keep its $18.5 million request. Let them file it under “unpaid, and will remain unpaid forever.”

Further, if you step back and look at the bigger picture, South African public officials are behaving as though they still have a colonial mindset of oppression. I’m not the first person to say this. Many people have said this before. South African officials are treating African lives as disposable inconveniences to be managed, billed, and forgotten. And it is wrong.

Our people suffered enough on your soil. They will not be charged for the privilege of escaping it.

Zero.
Zilch.
Zaro.

And that is the final word on this idiotic demand.