Editorial cartoons on this page appear four days a week on the back page of THISDAY

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Tuesday 21 April 2015

Things Have Gone From Bad to Worse

When this cartoon was first published in Thisday in March 2008, foreigners, including Nigerians had, for some years, been enduring unbearable cruelty and meanness at the hands of South African authorities, the police in particular. While many African governments paid no attention to these maltreatments of their citizens, the malfeasance succeeded in emboldening ordinary South Africans with ideas of how they could treat these foreigners who would inevitably end up as their neighbours.

I followed up with another cartoon in August 2011 which addressed the South African people’s lack of appreciation of the contributions of Nigeria and other African countries to their struggle. http://bisiogunbadejo.blogspot.com/2011/08/libyan-struggle-south-africa-speaks-out.html

By the time the 2008 cartoon was repeated in 2012, South Africa Authorities had become even more brutal and had concocted more capers to keep Nigerians and other Africans out of their country (see the note at the bottom of the cartoon). And of course, the ordinary South African had become more emboldened and ready to twist the knife in the wound, helped by the fact that this category of immigrants seemed to have become inured to Police brutality. The South African government is now confronted with the task of containing the monster it created. But, can they swing it?