Ghana evacuated nearly 2 000 of its citizens from South Africa following a wave of xenophobic attacks, and says the door remains open should violence flare up again.

The assurance comes after fresh violence broke out in Soweto and the east coast city of Durban on Friday (9 October), where crowds torched several cars and looted small foreign-run stores.

The unrest followed a Constitutional Court ruling that found certain procedural barriers to asylum seekers unconstitutional, prompting the South African Home Affairs Department to order refugee reception offices to resume processing applications.

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Ghana’s Foreign Affairs Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, speaking on Key Points, a TV3 national news programme on Saturday 10 October, said the evacuation left no Ghanaian in distress behind. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a series of press releases based on the interview on Monday 12 October.

During the interview, he noted that the evacuation covered all Ghanaians in distress, including those who had sought refuge at the Ghanaian Mission in Pretoria and the Church of Pentecost. He added that he personally visited the Chairperson of the Church of Pentecost to commend him for sheltering Ghanaian citizens, on behalf of President John Dramani Mahama.

“There have been many waves of these xenophobic attacks, but this is the first time that the government of Ghana has acted so swiftly to take our citizens who were willing, who voluntarily signed up to be taken out of harm’s way,” he said.

Ablakwa maintained the door remains open for further evacuations should the situation in South Africa deteriorate again.

He stressed that Ghana takes its citizen protection responsibilities very seriously.

“Our motto at the Ministry when it comes to these matters is that: ‘when you touch one Ghanaian, you touch all of us’,” he said.

He added that the ministry will immediately mobilise should any citizen be harmed.

Ablakwa addressed anti-immigrant sentiment across Africa, urging leaders and citizens across the continent not to see immigrants or people travelling under Africa’s free movement agreements as detrimental to a country’s national progress.

“They are not parasites. We can have an arrangement where we have regulated migration, where the free movement protocols are respected, where the rights of all persons are not violated just because they are travellers,” he said.

Ablakwa invoked the vision of former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah.

“We have won the battle against political subjugation, colonialism, imperialism. We now must win the war against poverty, the war against economic underdevelopment. And I believe that can be achieved,” he said.

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