Barely a week after a Nigerian businessman was murdered in South Africa, a 17-year-old high school student, Chinonso Obiaju, has been murdered in cold blood in Johannesburg in what is seen as a re-surging wave of xenophobia.
Confirming the murder of the teenager, the President of the Nigerian Union in South Africa (NUSA), Adetola Olubajo, said Obiaju who lived with his guardian in Roodepoort, Johannesburg, was shot to death on Saturday, August 24.
In a telephone chat with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Olubajo said he got a report from the victim’s guardian, Mike Nsofor, that he was killed at about 6.30 pm.
Quoting Nsofor, Olubajo said:
“He went to buy something from a shop with his friend and someone chased and opened fire on them, killing him.”
The NUSA president said that the family would be burying the deceased in South Africa as he was born there and that the union’s leaders in Johannesburg would the family for other developments.
“He was born here, I learnt, and the mother is in the US. I have spoken to Mike Nsofor to pass the Nigerian community’s condolences and call for justice to be served in this case as anybody who hunts down a young schoolboy couldn’t have any justifiable reasons,” Olubajo said.
In the past five years, more than 300 Nigerians have been killed in South Africa with the Nigerian government not able to do anything to secure the lives and businesses of their citizens in the former apartheid enclave.
Discussion about this post