The Ghana People Are Back ooo

When buses carried exile home and children searched every window, 1983
By Napoleon Ato Kittoe

I was part of the children playing in our school park at Asante Effiduase in Ashanti Region. Soon, a huge ambience diverted our attention. We got attracted to arrivals announced with loud whistles. I first saw mini to medium-sized buses loaded with luggage, some tied to the roof and some hanging on the exteriors, tooting horns. That was 1983, when buses carried exiles home. All I heard some adults saying was, “The Ghana people are back ooo.”

People lined the streets to see which of their vehicles would arrive next, as they surfaced in singles and not as a convoy. Greater curiosity in bystanders was inspired by the desire to catch glimpses of relatives in the mass return. Yes, they were returnees from Nigeria, having been expelled by the government of that country.

Radio sets and table fans were very much in their collections. That made them look like heroes because they were part of the things people strove for all their lives. We got the catchphrase “Ghana must go” from the suitcases that hung off the sides of history. A Nigeria sneeze, and Ghana caught a cold.

Since they were arriving in batches, my family’s anxiety was heightened in expectation of one of my cherished siblings, Joshua Kittoe, an older brother who lived in Surulere, Lagos, Nigeria’s federal capital at the time. Bra Akwasi’s boss in Nigeria was a rich and influential figure. As my brother didn’t turn up, the family gave him three options: either he was dead, impeded by something, or was in a comfortable situation, as his boss could arrange.

Point one was categorized as a factor in his absence due to horrible stories told by those who arrived first. It was dreadful to hear them saying family members who had gone incommunicado in Nigeria might have passed away. The accounts had it that some Ghanaians who were masons fell to their deaths from a height during building construction, were knocked down by vehicles, or were smitten by some evil moment. Well, Bra Akwasi never told the family he was involved in masonry, so we kept hopes alive.

Eventually, our brother never came, but he beat the odds with a letter he mailed to us a few months after the 1983 wave. He looked exuberant and polished from the photos he enclosed in the mail, and we all switched to a mode of happiness. He arrived in 1984 but was no longer in sync with the lifestyle back home, so he departed again to Lagos. His mind was made up, so he took a straight line.

However, the same was not the circumstance of other returnees who also struggled to integrate into society and were caught in all sorts of dilemmas. Everything that characterized that episode was epochal, as I grew to understand it.

I saw the young Ghanaian leader at the forefront of buzzing activities to absorb the returnees, so as to avoid social, cultural, and economic hiccups. Repatriation centres sprang up quickly at Aflao, where officials screened arrivals, recorded names, and gave out small stipends for transport home. Trucks were mobilized to move families inland. The PNDC also pushed “self-help” projects in communities, hoping the sudden population would rebuild schools and clinics instead of overwhelming them.

It was order imposed on chaos. But order could not erase the dilemmas. Teachers returned to find no classrooms. Masons returned to find no contracts. Sons returned to find their fathers had aged ten years in their absence.

The emergence of the influx collided with an existing emergency: the food crisis in Ghana. Members of the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution, CDRs, shared staples among people who had formed queues. Dire austerity it was. Food scarcity with many mouths to feed.

There was a big clash when Nigeria’s former leader, overthrown by the military, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, paid a courtesy call to President Rawlings in Accra, Ghana, to commiserate with his government and people following the death of Hilla Limann, immediate predecessor of Rawlings. Rawlings charged in the pain of the decision Shagari took to evict Ghanaians, and I bet you the harsh words exchanged between the two were not easy at all. I had become a journalist and was assigned to cover the meeting.

Rawlings said because Shagari was a friend of Limann whom he overthrew, he expelled the Ghanaians to unsettle his government as a retaliatory measure.

In June 2026, President Mahama of Ghana declared citizens in the diaspora to be the seventeenth region. He said at the forum with Ghanaians residing in the United Kingdom that the government was proud of them for making gargantuan contributions from remittances to Gross Domestic Product. That underscores Ghana’s interest in their inflows.

Global Context
Global interconnectivity is both physical and digital. Morocco fully recognizes this, as evidenced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Moroccan Expatriates.

The world’s El Dorado – the United States and its Western European allies – have been tightening the screws on inbound travel for non-citizens in protection of national interests.

In a world where nations jostle for the best titles, China disentangled itself from the tag of the world’s most populous nation, freely allowing India to bypass it. The Communist Government of China only recently lifted the ban on childbirth from one to two per couple. That example points to where the emphasis should be next, after corruption curbs.

Lower populations have translated to higher per capita incomes in countries like Gabon, Qatar, and the UAE.

Nigeria, with its oil business boom in the 1970s, has steadily slipped into internal economic dogfighting, with immense petroleum resources unable to erase poverty.

The point must be made that Ghanaians are adventurous, and their belief that the grass on the other side is greener makes them move. They could be on Christmas Island and Fiji in the Pacific, and the archipelagos of Indonesia. They are in unimaginable places on the planet. They may even be found in the igloos of Greenland. The shelter to warm people in extremely cold weather was in our school textbooks in 1983.

Some are caught in perilous journeys, especially the unconventional and inconvenient voyages on the Mediterranean, which have ended in drownings. One of the worst foreign visitor plights was the July 2005 massacre of Ghanaians in The Gambia. Over 44 Ghanaian migrants bound for Europe were arrested at Barra beach on July 22, then summarily executed by a paramilitary “Junglers” unit, allegedly acting on orders of then-President Yahya Jammeh. They were suspected of being mercenaries intent on overthrowing the government.

During a state visit to Benin in 2014, the host president, Dr Thomas Boni Yayi, brought up the issue of Ghanaian immigrants, saying the economy of Ghana might have picked up, which was why their presence in Benin had diminished – “We don’t see Ghanaians doing shoeshine in Benin anymore,” he told President Mahama. That was the age-old problem. I believe those in Benin were the ones who stopped in transit on their road journeys to Nigeria. Many of them left Ghana using unapproved routes. Meanwhile, Ghana boasts an economy with larger resources than Benin.

So, were the departures influenced by mere fantasies or the pastures as usual?

But really, nothing surprises me anymore. The media, which I became a member of later in life, is a microcosm of real-life situations. The penchant of media practitioners to travel overseas at any opportunity is intriguing.

Fast forward the Ghana-Nigeria seesawing, we are now witnessing a reflux, with Nigerians swarming the retail business sector in Ghana. In the last two or three years, their Ghanaian counterparts have been complaining about the threat the Nigerians pose to local businesses. Thank God the government of Ghana resisted the temptation; its reaction was grounded in the spirit of good neighborliness and Pan-Africanism.

The reverse scenario of the 1983 winter of buses might symbolize a great comeback by Ghana. Again, in past years, it was Nigerians whom South Africans directed xenophobic attacks against. Yet again, that appeared to lend credence to the suspicion that the grass was withering on their side.

In May 2026, anti-migrant attacks in South Africa targeted all African nationals, recorded four Mozambican deaths, with Ghanaians facing some of the severest onslaughts. A statement, unconfirmed though, attributed to a leading South African figure clearly threw weight behind the xenophobia, saying South Africa cannot be host to the spiral of failed economies. “They should go back,” the statement concluded.

The Ghana government swiftly sent chartered flights to Johannesburg to pick up Ghanaians. That awakened reminiscence of two episodes between Ghana and Nigeria, 1983 and 1998, in which Ghanaians swiftly packed themselves into buses like sardines back home.

I was not born in the year I am about to mention. Historical records indicate Ghana was the first to fire the salvo through an Aliens Compliance Order in 1969. Foreign nationals dived in all directions for cover, abandoning their properties acquired in Ghana after years of sweat.

Following the formation of the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, in 1975, political leaders sought to cure the mutual reprisals under the protocol of free movement of goods and people across the subregion. Everywhere in West Africa is habitable by the nationals within.

One of the photographs I remember showed a scene during the first visit to Ghana by South African anti-apartheid hero, Nelson Mandela, soon after his release from a 27-year jail term. With him in the open-top vehicle ridden on popular streets in Accra was Ghana’s President, Jerry John Rawlings. Mandela had earlier visited Nigeria. The swift “Thank you” tour heralded his coronation as the first Black President of South Africa.

Mandela’s collaborator in the struggle, Oliver Tambo, was close-knit with Ghana. He was seen at the ceremonies marking the change of burial grounds of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah from Nkroful to the beautiful Mausoleum in Accra in 1991.

Ghana was one of the shrillest crusaders against all forms of colonization on the African continent – a campaign spearheaded by Dr. Nkrumah, who referred to the balkanization of the African continent as artificial creations by foreign invaders and predicated the independence of Ghana from Britain in 1957 on the total liberation of the African continent.

Xenophobia and mutual suspicions by succeeding generations clearly point to disconnects. The disconnect between political leaderships and the masses, and the disconnect between historical antecedents and contemporary people. These are voids calling for mass political education under the aegis of the African Union, which also appears to be the union of only political leaders minus the masses.

Ghana triggered a pulse on the continent under the leadership of Nana Akufo-Addo and John Dramani Mahama. The latter has ratcheted up the new wave: the unprecedented move on free visas between Ghana and all African nations. The Central African nation of Congo-Brazzaville, led by Denis Sassou Nguesso, has done the same. Other African nations are following suit, albeit in limited amounts.

These new measures and initiatives have pros and cons. The presence of enlarged physical markets to stimulate local businesses, but with the flipside of scaling up prices of goods and services in host countries, far beyond the means of the current citizens.

In Accra, for instance, rents have shot up dramatically because Nigerians have crafted a formula for access. Three or four of them contribute to paying exorbitant rent advances quoted by the landlords. The hapless citizens settle in shanty or makeshift structures.

The COVID lockdown in the year 2020 revealed the truth about the realities of the people. A pushback one day? Very, very tricky.