• As South Africa Repays Nigeria’s Sacrifices with Xenophobic Attacks
By Olabode Opeseitan
There are moments when a single court ruling exposes a nation’s institutional vulnerabilities with the precision of a scalpel. One such moment arrived on April 15th, 2026, when Justice Ambrose Lewis-Allagoa of the Federal High Court, sitting in Ikoyi, Lagos, granted an interim injunction suspending Nigeria’s Digital, Electronic, Online, or Non-Traditional Consumer Lending Regulations 2025, a framework built specifically to give equal opportunities to Nigerian companies and open a ₦3 trillion market to Nigerian-owned fintechs. According to Premium Times, the injunction was secured through an ex parte motion filed by the Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Nigeria (WASPAN), through its counsel Kemi Pinheiro, SAN, challenging the FCCPC’s authority to enforce the regulations. WASPAN has publicly maintained it acted independently and in the interest of its Nigerian members.
However, analysts and regulators argue the suit’s principal commercial beneficiary is Optasia, a company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange that operates in Nigeria as Nairatime, and whose subsidiary, Nairatime Nigeria Ltd, obtained a separate injunction on April 24th, Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/779/2026, directly restraining MTN Nigeria and Airtel from disrupting its platforms, according to The Guardian. A South African-listed company, using Nigerian courts, to neutralize Nigerian economic policy. That paradox is as alarming as it is instructive.
Justice Lewis-Allagoa is a judge of considerable professional record, having presided over notable matters including the vindication of a lawyer’s constitutional rights against police overreach, as reported by ThisDay.
The circumstances surrounding the ex parte order, granted on a one-sided application without hearing Nigeria’s own regulator, and subsequently extended on April 30th when the FCCPC appeared in court to vacate it, as reported by the media, demand transparent scrutiny.
At the centre of this controversy stands Optasia’s CEO, Bassim Haidar. A voice recording, now publicly circulating and attributed to Haidar by the X account Afrisagacity, purportedly captures him expressing determination to resist the FCCPC’s regulations. The recording has not been independently verified, and neither Haidar nor Optasia has publicly responded to its contents. When the FCCPC declined to yield, Optasia’s subsidiary Nairatime Nigeria Ltd moved swiftly, securing a court order on April 24th restraining MTN Nigeria and Airtel from interfering with Nairatime’s access to their platforms, according to The Guardian. The strategy was as deliberate as it was audacious: use the Nigerian judicial system to accomplish what lobbying alone could not.
Optasia then launched vicious media campaigns portraying the FCCPC as anti-consumer, accusing Nigeria’s consumer protection commission of harming the very Nigerians its mandate was designed to shield. It was a counterintuitive gambit. Under Tunji Bello, the FCCPC had built a global reputation for shielding everyday Nigerians from corporate exploitation and price gouging.
The FCCPC, stung, publicly accused “vested interests and their foreign collaborators” of spreading misinformation to undermine consumer protection, according to information on Nairaland.
Civil society groups petitioning the FCCPC further warned, as reported by TVC News, that Optasia’s conduct “entrenches monopolistic tendencies.” They frowned at any attempt to use Nigerian courts to shield a foreign operator from Nigerian regulators.
The monopoly itself is breathtaking in scope. According to Legit.ng, Optasia holds so complete a grip on Nigeria’s telecoms lending sector that it alone provides the technology through which MTN, Airtel, Globacom, and T2Mobile extend airtime and data credit to an estimated 40 million Nigerian subscribers. Not a single Nigerian company occupies that position. The FCCPC’s DEON Regulations were built to correct precisely that imbalance, mandating that telecoms partner with at least one Nigerian-owned intermediary. Premium Times reports that analysts have urged the Nigerian government to “stand firm, reject the lobbying, and fully implement the FCCPC digital lending regulations.” In every other of the nearly 40 countries where Optasia operates, including South Africa where it enjoys the privileges of JSE listing, it follows local regulations without theatrical resistance. Only in Nigeria does it feel entitled to sovereignty-shopping.
A sharp-eyed reader Lola, posting on X, has sharpened the wound further: the FCCPC approved five Nigerian companies, Total Tim Nigeria, Rane Interactive Medien, Mode NG Applications, Cloud Interactive Associate, and Coverage Broadband, to enter this ₦3 trillion market. Weeks have elapsed. Not one has launched a single product. The silence is not timidity. It is the rational calculus of entrepreneurs watching a foreign corporation openly challenge regulatory sovereignty, waiting to see whether Nigeria will defend itself. As Legit.ng reported, the FCCPC’s regulatory architecture, carefully constructed over months, has been placed in legal limbo pending final judicial determination. Capital does not plant itself in frozen ground.
This corporate siege, however, does not exist in isolation. It is the freshest wound in a long pattern of asymmetric conduct between two nations whose relationship was forged in sacrifice and corroded by ingratitude. South African capital has built some of its richest foreign operations on Nigerian soil: MTN, whose single most profitable market is Nigeria; MultiChoice, whose DStv and GOtv platforms dominated Nigerian pay-television for decades, extracting billions annually from Nigerian households even as it repeatedly hiked prices on struggling consumers; Stanbic IBTC Bank, Standard Bank, SABMiller, and Protea Hotels, which continues to expand across Nigerian cities. Shoprite and Woolworths, having harvested Nigeria’s retail market for years, eventually exited when economic conditions turned against them, as catalogued across multiple Nigerian business platforms. Nigeria erected no barriers. Nigeria said: come, build, thrive.
The welcome was not returned. When media baron Nduka Obaigbena sought to extend his THISDAY newspaper brand into South Africa, he encountered regulatory obstruction and licensing hostility designed to suffocate rather than engage, according to Africa Confidential. When Globacom sought to establish a presence in South Africa, it found the doors firmly shut, despite the openness Nigeria had extended to South African operators on home soil, as documented by multiple Nigerian business sources. Globacom today ranks among Africa’s leading mobile operators, while its Glo 1 undersea cable infrastructure connects 17 African and European countries. South Africa, the continent’s most developed economy, remains firmly off limits. The asymmetry is not accidental. The door is engineered to open in only one direction.
On South Africa’s streets, that asymmetry takes its most savage form. Xenophobic attacks targeting African migrants, Nigerians with particular ferocity, have surged with renewed intensity in 2026, drawing formal condemnation from Nigeria, Ghana, and the African Union, as reported by Deutsche Welle and multiple African news platforms. Former President Thabo Mbeki has spoken with the moral authority his generation commands, stating plainly that South Africa’s economic failures belong to South Africans themselves and cannot be blamed on migrants who helped the country earn its freedom. Former South African Home Affairs Minister Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has echoed those convictions. These are the voices of leaders who remember which African nations marched, financed, and bled for liberation. Their clarity is not in dispute. What is in dispute is why a sitting president refuses to match it.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, a man whose own political biography is inscribed in the negotiations that dismantled apartheid, has responded to the current xenophobic wave with language calibrated for minimal political damage. He called for calm, invoked unity, and simultaneously pledged crackdowns on illegal immigration, framing that, whether by design or negligence, validates the premise beneath the violence. As Deutsche Welle reported in May 2026, South Africa’s government condemns attacks when cameras arrive and retreats when they leave; arrests remain limited, prosecutions rarer still, and the structural conditions enabling the mob remain architecturally intact. A man of Ramaphosa’s standing knows the difference between managing optics and exercising moral leadership. He has chosen the former, and history will not be generous about it.
He should know more intimately than most what Nigeria actually sacrificed. In 1976, the Nigerian government established the Southern Africa Relief Fund (SARF), which ordinary Nigerians came to call the “Mandela Tax”. The administration instituted an official policy compelling civil servants to contribute a percentage of their monthly pay to the fund, a mandate supported by contributions from university students out of their own meager allowances. Historical and diplomatic analyses document that within its first six months, these broad public and institutional contributions raised millions of dollars channeled directly to providing relief, education, and material support to South African refugees and allied liberation organizations. South African students studied on Nigerian scholarships. ANC freedom fighters found sanctuary in Lagos when the world still debated whether Nelson Mandela was a liberator or a criminal. Nigeria gave from its limited resources to purchase someone else’s freedom, without reservation and without a receipt.
That is the history. This is the present: a South African-listed company using Nigerian courts to kill Nigerian economic policy; South African enterprises harvesting Nigerian consumers while Nigerian entrepreneurs are locked out of South African markets; Nigerian nationals hunted in South African townships while a South African president carefully moderates his vocabulary. The contrast requires no amplification. It requires only honesty. And corporate Nigeria, watching the Optasia saga unfold in the pages of Premium Times, The Guardian, and across X, is now speaking that honesty with unmistakable clarity.
What Nigeria requires now is not anger in isolation but architecture. The National Judicial Council must examine the judicial handling of the Optasia proceedings and satisfy Nigerians that the bench remains a place of sovereign integrity, as the NJC’s own Judicial Discipline Regulations empower it to do. This should come as part of a moral duty to respond to a broader whispering campaign in town against a new wave of judiciary capture.
For instance, before now, to illustrate growing loss of public confidence, the story was told of a particular senior member of the bar (so notorious that his award of SAN was delayed following an avalanche of petitions against his long record of unethical practices) specialising in hustling for high-price briefs and, in turn, ensuring that a particular Lagos judge hears such. The outcome is predictable: favourable judgements always! No matter how bad the case is. Of course, no price for guessing what would have happened under the table. No assault could be more grievous on the justice system.
Nigerian courts must develop the institutional discipline to weigh the full geopolitical and economic implications before granting sweeping one-sided orders that hand foreign corporations authority over domestic regulators. The government must defend the FCCPC’s mandate with a ferocity proportionate to Optasia’s assault on it. And those five licensed Nigerian fintech companies standing at the edge of a ₦3 trillion market deserve the governmental spine and regulatory certainty to step forward. South Africa was partly freed by Nigerian sacrifice made from Nigeria’s limited resources.
That sacrifice demands, at absolute minimum, a Nigeria that defends its own sovereignty in return.
Olabode Opeseitan; a Strategic Communications Professional, an Editorial architect and Author.
