Nigerians in Gauteng were warned yesterday. Another anti-foreigner march is coming on May 4.

On Thursday, the Nigerian Citizens Association South Africa issued a warning to Nigerians living in Gauteng Province. Stay cautious. Stay vigilant. A planned anti-foreign-national march is coming.

This is the third time in six weeks that Nigerians in South Africa have been told to keep their heads down.

The first time was late March, after an Igbo community leader named Solomon Ogbonna Eziko was crowned "Eze Ndi Igbo East London" in the port city of KuGompo. Installing an Eze Ndi Igbo is a common practice among Igbos living away from home. There are communities doing it in London, in Houston, in Toronto. In KuGompo it turned violent. South African demonstrators torched 10 vehicles. Shops were looted. Twenty-six Nigerians were hospitalised. The Nigerian High Commission issued a 10-point advisory telling citizens to suspend social activities, moderate movement, and avoid inflammatory statements online. The mayor of KuGompo said she supported the march but not the violence. No arrests were made.

The second time was two weeks later, when protests reached the Nigerian High Commission in Pretoria. Groups including ActionSA and March and March demonstrated outside. The tension spread from the Eastern Cape into Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.

Now there is a May 4 countrywide shutdown. The organising groups have been explicit. "We are xenophobic," reads one message. "We want all foreigners, documented or not, out of this country as a matter of urgency." The demand includes deportations, business closures, removal of foreign nationals from hospitals and schools. South Africa's local government elections are later this year. Anti-migrant sentiment is one of the most reliable mobilising forces in that cycle.

The mechanism is not complicated. South Africa's unemployment rate is 33 percent. Youth unemployment is above 60 percent. The government of national unity has not been able to change either number. When governments can't deliver jobs they need something else to run on. Foreign nationals are available. They don't vote. They are visible. The political logic writes itself.

Nigerians are not the only target. Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Ghanaians, Somalis. The category is "foreigner," and the anger lands on whoever is nearest. But Nigerians carry a specific weight in South Africa's national imagination. High-profile criminal cases. Years of diplomatic friction. The persistent narrative that Nigeria's diaspora is responsible for drug markets and fraud. That narrative is not fabricated from nothing. It is also not the whole truth. What it does is make Nigerians the face of a problem that is really about South Africa's own failures.

The person running the calculation this week is the Nigerian woman in Johannesburg who has a shop to open on Monday morning. She has done this before. She knows what a quiet morning means and what noise outside means. She is not thinking about diplomatic relations or government statements. She is thinking about whether to go in.

That calculation is what the Nigerian government's advisory asks her to manage alone. South Africa has not arrested anyone for the KuGompo violence. Nigeria has not withdrawn its ambassador. The formal relationship between the two countries continues. The informal relationship is something Nigerians in Gauteng carry by themselves.

The march is May 4. There are ten days.