RCCG receives 100 Nigerian returnees from South Africa

LAGOS — The first 100 of what will eventually be 500 Nigerians stranded in South Africa touched down at Murtala Muhammed International Airport this week.

Their air tickets paid for not by the Nigerian government directly, but by the Redeemed Christian Church of God, under an intervention personally approved by General Overseer Pastor Enoch Adeboye.

ValidViewNetwork can confirm that RCCG’s Task Force Chairman, Pastor Belemina Obunge, was explicit that beneficiaries were selected without regard to church membership.

Rather the church worked with the Nigerian High Commission in South Africa and South africa’s Home Affairs ministry to profile and document eligible returnees, drawing from Muslim and Christian Nigerians alike.

This isn’t RCCG’s first rescue mission

Findings show this humanitarian intervention builds directly on the church’s own prior track record: RCCG had already airlifted an earlier batch of 100 Nigerians from South Africa before this latest arrival.

This means that the church has now personally funded the safe return of at least 200 of its planned 500, executing, in practice, a diaspora repatriation programme at a scale usually associated with government emergency response rather than a religious organisation’s charity budget.

The xenophobia backdrop this doesn’t mention outright

According to reports gotten by ValidViewNetwork, this repatriation effort sits within a longer, grimmer pattern.

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Recurring waves of xenophobic violence against Nigerians and other African migrants in South Africa have periodically forced exactly this kind of emergency evacuation response, with previous incidents including the shooting death of a Nigerian father of two in South Africa.

This underscores how dangerous conditions have become for Nigerian nationals there.

It is worth asking plainly: where was the government?

ValidViewNetwork gathered that Pastor Obunge specifically thanked Nigeria’s diplomatic missions in South Africa for coordinating the profiling process, but coordination is not the same as funding, and it is RCCG’s treasury, not a federal repatriation budget, covering the actual airfare.

Readers should sit with that asymmetry: a private religious institution stepping in to fund what is, in any reasonable accounting, a core state responsibility toward citizens in danger abroad. ValidViewNetwork reports.