We saw it. Did you?

On Friday, the foreign ministers of Nigeria and Ghana met on the sidelines of an ECOWAS gathering in Liberia. They did the thing governments do when they want to be seen responding without actually committing to anything. They condemned the xenophobic attacks in South Africa. Both ministers said the word Afrophobia out loud. They called for urgent, coordinated regional responses. They agreed to raise it at the next African Union summit, which is still months away.

What wasn't in that statement matters. No legal route named. No deadline. No number attached to compensation. Just condemnation, and a promise to raise it at a summit that hasn't happened yet.

If you were reading carefully on Friday, that absence was the signal. A statement that condemns but commits to nothing specific is a statement that expects the story to move past before anyone checks what actually changed. It's the diplomatic version of saying you'll look into it.

By Sunday, Femi Falana had said out loud what the Friday statement quietly avoided saying. Condemnation gets you nowhere. The African Union has no power to force South Africa to pay anyone anything. The African Court does, but only if Nigeria and Ghana actually file there instead of talking about it at another summit.

There was one more detail in Friday's statement worth catching. Both ministers agreed the issue should be raised at the next AU summit, which is early next year. That's not a small gap. It's a gap of months, during which more Nigerians could be affected and the compensation question could sit exactly where it sits now. A careful reader on Friday could have asked why the timeline was measured in months rather than weeks, and gotten no answer, because there wasn't one.

The gap between Friday's language and Sunday's language is the whole story in miniature. Soft words come first, and they come fast. The words that actually cost something, that commit to a specific legal process with a specific outcome, take longer to arrive, if they arrive at all. Anyone reading the Friday statement closely already knew a firmer response was needed. The only question was whether anyone with the power to file at the African Court would say so before the news cycle moved on.