South Africa will host the 2010 World Cup, the premier Soccer event of the World. Preparations are in high gear, stadiums have been built and businesses are planning to reap a windfall out this sporting event. For a country that has been independent for less than 15 years, this is an important milestone. South African struggle for independence and the dismantling of the apartheid regime was supported by African countries with some like Angola paying a very high price when they were invaded by the white South African army. Countries like Zimbabwe provided homage to South African refugees and freedom fighters and others like Lesotho and Botswana took in the occasional dissident on his way to the Western capitals of London and New York.

Libya, Tanzania and Uganda provided training and armaments for the ANC armed wing while other East African counties played a vocal role in encouraging the boycott of South African goods produced under the apartheid government. It is this pressure and the persistent struggle by South Africans that toppled the racist regime of the few whites and ushered in Nelson Mandela into power. The African people of all persuasion ganged up for South Africa morally and materially, helping them to take over power from the apartheid government which had inflicted gross injuries on the persons and pride of black South Africans. Africans therefore see South Africa as a lead nation in the continent that they helped create and expect that South Africans will reciprocate with grateful understanding, democratic governance, respect for human rights and pan-African value approach. South Africa\u2019s actions and attitude towards other Africans has been disappointing. Black South Africans seem to have developed a penchant for self- destruction, laziness and the worst xenophobic reactions against other immigrant Africans.

Africa has had intermittent wars, famine and dictators that have ravaged the land and created a mass of stateless people like Somalis, political refugees like Zimbabweans and humanitarian refugees fleeing wars like the Congolese. It is not the choice of these people that they had sought asylum in other African countries. In all the African countries that host these immigrants none has treated them worse than South Africa which has imposed officially sanctioned xenophobia against these immigrants. Tanzania is only second to South Africa when it comes to the mean treatment of Africans not indigenous to its country. Refugees are mistreated in Kenya but not to an extent of massacring them in large scale; they are mistreated in Uganda but they are allowed to stay and earn a living so long they do not engage in criminal behaviour; they are mistreated in all other African countries but not too much worse than the local population. Tanzania treats foreigners with disdain, its people are xenophobic towards other Africans and blame them for job losses and crimes. The government occasionally deports African immigrants and the police shoot the errant ones like what happened to a group of seven Kenyan businessmen in 2007.