One of the shining stars in the Bafana Bafana team that has represented SA so well at this year’s Fifa World Cup is 21-year-old Ime Okon.
It is an unusual surname for a South African, and one that is most prominent among the Efik and Ibibio people in the southern-most part of Nigeria.
But the player is as South African as they come, having been born and bred in Florida, west of Johannesburg, where he made a name for himself as a star teenage soccer player.
His mother is South African but his father was born in Nigeria.
A few years ago, he had a chance to choose to represent the Super Eagles but chose Bafana.
His younger brother, Udeme, is a South African sprinter who won gold at the 2024 World Athletics U20 Championships.
The brothers are obviously not the first athletes with roots from elsewhere who have represented SA in various sporting codes.
Among many such athletes we include such celebrated stars as the Springboks’ Beast Mtawarira.
As a country, in sports and elsewhere, SA has benefited immensely from immigrants.
One can hardly talk of any success, whether from economic development to politics and sports, without remarking on the role of people whose ancestors are not South African.
It is saddening, therefore, that in the week in which we are celebrating Akon’s contribution to our soccer national team’s milestone of coming out of the group stages of the World Cup, many of our citizens and residents — many of them of foreign origins — are living in fear due to a deadline set by a vigilante group for undocumented foreigners to leave our shores.
While we all acknowledge the growing crisis of undocumented foreigners, the task of arresting and deporting those who are in the country illegally should be left to the police and other law enforcement agencies, and not vigilante groups.
We therefore join the calls for restraint and the respect of human rights and the country’s laws during the anti-illegal immigrants protests that are set to take place in various parts of the country tomorrow.
No-one has a right to make others live in fear and feel unwelcome in the country just because, like Akon, they look darker than the average South African and carry a surname that does not originate from this little part of our continent, Africa.
