A Nigerian woman, Aderonke Ololade-Matsaung, married to a retired apartheid soldier, Lt.-Col. Richard Matsaung (retd.), her four children and grandchild, who is a toddler, have been displaced from their Durban residence in South Africa.
Narrating her ordeal to Sunday PUNCH, Ololade-Matsaung said about 100 armed South African soldiers invaded her home at about 7am on February 10, displacing her entire family and carting away their property in military trucks.
She said, “On that Thursday morning, I had some visitors when my son suddenly ran into my room screaming that there were ‘a million soldiers in the yard’. Next thing we heard was the door being broken down and a large number of military personnel swarmed into the house.
“My daughter and I were not properly dressed but they wouldn’t allow us to have a change of clothing; they surrounded us and asked us to move out. I wanted to run to court but the soldiers stopped me from leaving as they created a human barricade while pointing their rifles at me. They asked us to sit on the grass outside.”
She said the soldiers came with guns, trackers, an armoured tank and sniffing dogs. “They asked whose house we were living in and I told them it was military quarters,” she added. “One of the soldiers harassed my visitors, questioning their stay in the country and they even asked my children to show their documents.”
At the moment, Ololade-Matsaung, who has spent 28 years in the country, said she had nothing left as all her property, including curtains, school certificates, documents and clothes had been confiscated.
Now constrained to squat with a Nigerian family of six in their two bedroom apartment, she said they had become a burden to their benefactors who couldn’t complain out of love.
Asked what she could have done wrong to bring about such treatment, she said in January she harboured an 18-year-old South African girl who was pushed into the streets late at night by her mother who is a soldier.
“The girl is my daughter’s friend and I could not turn my back on her. She was in the rain around 10pm. The girl was with us until the morning of that incident. After she moved into our home, some policemen came and demanded to see the girl. They spoke in their native language, but she later told us she narrated to them the abuse she had suffered in the hands of her mother.”
“She said her mother sat on her and strangled her but she escaped with the help of her cousin who pulled her mother away and that she explained to them how we gave her shelter. I requested to speak to her mom but a police officer said it was not necessary. The woman also didn’t want to talk to me because she was enraged that I harboured her vulnerable daughter. Now she paid me back by concocting lies about me to the military, and that is why I’m in this situation.”
She said the woman accused her of dealing in drugs and running a brothel, which she described as untrue. “She lied against me and because they don’t like foreigners, they didn’t do any investigation, rather they invaded my house and took my properties away. They even accused me of stealing and running a syndicate. These are pure lies; I have never done such things in my life. Many people in Durban know me as a Nigerian who hawks goods.’’
Speaking on her husbands’ whereabouts, she said they divorced years after he left her and their children to stay with another woman. She said they moved from Pretoria to Durban in 2005 when he was named the Intelligence Officer by the Department of Defence.
She added, “Richard travelled a lot, I would always be at home with the children. He didn’t know anything about their school or their grades. I took care of the home. I was unemployed, so I took him to court so he could be asked to pay for the family’s maintenance.
“Between March 2011 and August 2012, he was paying into my account but it ended abruptly and we started struggling. One day, he left without telling us anything. It was after a year we learnt he had been transferred and was living with his girlfriend in another military camp where we were transferred from initially. He and the lady lived in the camp for three years.”
She said it was 2015 she learnt he had been allocated another staff quarters where he stayed with another woman, even while he was still married to her. She wondered why the military could give him another house when his family was in one previously allocated to him. She said these developments affected her psychologically and she had to seek medical help.
Ololade-Matsaung explained that her husband came back home sometime in 2016 and that under the pretense of taking the children out for shopping, he ran away with them to Johannesburg.
“I almost ran mad; they were all I had and worked so hard for,” she said. “They didn’t even have the chance to say goodbye to their mother and they must have been terrified. I would have felt better if I knew they had adequate care, but he kept them in the house for up to six months and they couldn’t go to school.”
She said they eventually divorced and the court ordered him to pay her R5,000 monthly and that she was to be entitled to a portion of his estate after he retired but that she wasn’t paid. In 2020 when Covid-19 became a pandemic and there was a lockdown, she moved the goods in her shop home, all of which the soldiers packed when they invaded her house.
Having lost all she had, the distraught mother of four called on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission to intervene and help her retrieve her property, including all their certificates and documents. She also asked for her ex-husband to be compelled to obey the court ruling by paying the monthly upkeep due to her and her children.
When our correspondent contacted NIDCOM, the Public Relations Officer, Abdul-Rahman Balogun, asked Ololade-Matsaung to reach out to the Nigerian High Commission in South Africa, saying Nigerians in foreign countries should always contact the Nigerian embassy in their countries if they needed any form of help.
Balogun added, “First, we are hearing about this issue for the first time, hence we need to know the nitty-gritty of the story to know what to do. However, Mrs Aderonke Ololade-Matsaung should reach out to the Nigerian Embassy in South Africa for support.
“The embassy could help her and the kids with temporary accommodation and they may also give her legal support if they deem it fit. Even if we are to take up the issue from here, we would still need to contact the embassy in South Africa. We are in Abuja, it is the embassies across the world that take up these issues. It is when they become helpless that we come in.”
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