By Vicky Owusu-Ansah, Chairperson, New Patriotic Party, Canada Branch
On Wednesday, May 27, 2026, a repatriation flight from Johannesburg landed at Accra International Airport carrying roughly 300 Ghanaians. They did not leave South Africa by choice. They left by fear. Another 500 are preparing to follow.
I have seen this scene before. We have all seen it before. And that familiarity is the very thing that should unsettle us most.
Ghana has been here repeatedly. Since 2017, the International Organization for Migration has facilitated the return of thousands of Ghanaians from Libya, where many suffered slave-like conditions, detention, and abuse while attempting to reach Europe. By early 2024, over 5,000 Ghanaians had returned under the IOM’s Voluntary Humanitarian Return programme alone, most arriving with broken savings, broken health, and no reintegration plan waiting for them beyond a government handshake and an IOM pocket allowance. In 2019, the Ghana Immigration Service confirmed deportations from Saudi Arabia involving Ghanaian women who returned with accounts of assault and abuse. Between August and November 2022, over 450 Ghanaians stranded in the UAE were repatriated with similar stories of abandoned contracts and unpaid wages. Earlier this year, Parliament was told that Ghanaians being deported from the United States under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown had spent years abroad and, in many cases, would not even know their way around Accra upon return, so complete was their disconnection from a country that had moved on without them.
Each time, Ghana received its children with cameras, songs, and ministerial speeches. Each time, the cameras moved on and the returnees were left to navigate a labour market that did not create enough jobs for the people who never left, let alone those arriving home without savings, professional networks, or in some cases, a roof.
This is the pattern. And this government, like those before it, has not broken it.
In South Africa, a vigilante movement called March and March has issued a deadline of June 30, 2026, demanding that all undocumented foreign nationals leave the country or face a national shutdown. It carries no legal authority and has not been endorsed by South African authorities. But Ghanaian men have been beaten in the streets of Soweto, a mayor in Estcourt seized the keys to legally documented Ghanaian-owned businesses and handed them to locals, and hundreds of migrants are sleeping outside government offices in Durban too frightened to go home. South Africa’s youth unemployment sits above 43 percent, and the politics of economic despair have found their usual outlet: the foreigner.
Foreign Minister Ablakwa summoned South Africa’s envoy and petitioned the African Union. These were the right steps, and they deserve acknowledgment. But they are not a policy. They are a response. There is a difference.
Ghana provided funding, asylum, education, and sustained diplomatic support to South Africa’s liberation movement for decades. President Ramaphosa acknowledged this in a Freedom Day address fewer than thirty days before these flights departed. That a Ghanaian trader in Estcourt could have his keys taken by a local official in the same month those words were spoken is not merely ironic. It is an indictment that South Africa’s leaders must sit with, and must answer through action rather than further eloquence.
But this article is not primarily about South Africa. It is about Ghana and what Ghana keeps failing to do.
The Mahama administration accepted third-country deportees from the United States last year under a bilateral agreement that was challenged in Ghana’s Supreme Court and criticized across party lines as constitutionally irregular. Opposition lawmakers described the deal as raising “serious constitutional, sovereignty and foreign policy concerns which cannot be overlooked.” That same government is now receiving Ghanaian returnees from South Africa and is once again relying on improvisation to manage what should be an institutional capacity. A formal proposal for a multi-agency Diaspora Protection Task Force was submitted to the Presidency just days ago. It should not take a crisis to make that proposal worth reading.
What Ghana actually needs is not a task force proposal. It needs enacted legislation, funded and operational before the next emergency arrives. Specifically: a Diaspora Emergency Fund with standing disbursement authority that does not require ministerial discretion to activate; mandatory consular response timelines so that a Ghanaian detained or threatened abroad receives a documented response within 24 hours, not when the story makes the evening news; a national returnee reintegration programme with skills placement, micro-financing, and mental health support built in as standard, not offered as charity when donor funding permits; and a dedicated parliamentary oversight committee on diaspora affairs with the power to hold embassies accountable for their response records.
These are not aspirational ideas. Comparable frameworks exist in the Philippines, Mexico, and India, countries that decided their citizens abroad were a national asset worth protecting structurally, not periodically. Ghana’s diaspora sends home over four billion dollars in remittances annually. A country that accepts four billion dollars from its diaspora and cannot provide a funded emergency response when those same people are being beaten in the streets of Soweto is running an arrangement that works only in one direction.
The African Continental Free Trade Area has its secretariat in Accra. Its entire premise is the free movement of Africans across African soil. Every business seized from a Ghanaian migrant in KwaZulu-Natal is a direct, material contradiction of that premise, and the AU must treat it as such, not as a bilateral nuisance to be managed quietly between foreign ministries.
To Ghanaians in South Africa: your rights are real, your government is engaged, and you are not forgotten. Document yourself, maintain contact with the High Commission, and do not allow fear to cut you off from the networks that can help.
To the Ghanaian diaspora everywhere else: the question this moment asks is whether we are a community or a collection of individuals who share a passport. Support those returning. Advocate for the structures that should already exist. And hold our elected representatives accountable, not only when there is a crisis visible enough to demand a response, but for the institutional silence that made the crisis inevitable.
Ghana keeps receiving its children back home with dignity and without a plan. That must stop. The plane landed. The cameras will move on. What happens next is the only thing that actually matters.
The writer, Vicky Owusu-Ansah, is Chairperson, New Patriotic Party, Canada Branch.
About The Author
