The Council Of State Is Wrong On Dual Citizenship — And Ghana Cannot Afford The Error (1)

On 7 July 2026, the Speaker of Parliament announced that the Council of State had advised against passage of the Constitution of the Republic of Ghana (Amendment) Bill, 2025 — the bill that would remove the constitutional restrictions barring dual citizens from public office. The advice is not binding. Article 291(2) requires the Council's opinion; it does not require Parliament's obedience. And Parliament should not obey it, because the advice is wrong in law, wrong in history, and wrong on the evidence of every serious democracy that has confronted this question.

What makes the Council's position remarkable is that it reverses itself: the same institution endorsed substantially the same reform during the Eighth Parliament. Nothing has changed since — except that the case for reform has grown stronger. The Supreme Court has struck down part of the exclusionary regime as unconstitutional. The Presidency and cross-party sponsors back the bill. Diaspora remittances have reached roughly US$7.8 billion a year — dwarfing foreign direct investment and rivalling gold and cocoa as a pillar of the national balance sheet. President Mahama has rightly called the diaspora Ghana's “17th region.” The Council of State now proposes to tell that region: your money is welcome; your service is not.

1. The Legal Case: An Exclusionary Regime Already in Ruins

The 1992 Constitution originally stripped Ghanaians of citizenship if they acquired another. The 1996 amendment (Act 527) corrected that harshness: Article 8(1) now permits dual citizenship. But it came with a rider. Article 8(2) barred dual citizens from a list of offices — Ambassador, Secretary to the Cabinet, Chief of Defence Staff and the Service Chiefs, Inspector-General of Police, Commissioner of Customs, Director of Immigration — and let Parliament add more by statute. Article 94(2)(a) separately disqualifies from Parliament anyone who “owes allegiance” to another country. Parliament used its statutory power enthusiastically: Section 16(2) of the Citizenship Act, 2000 (Act 591) extended the exclusion to the Chief Justice and Supreme Court Justices, Chief Directors, senior military officers, and — extraordinarily — any other office a Minister might prescribe by legislative instrument.

The courts have been dismantling this regime for over a decade. In Asare v. Attorney-General (2012), the Supreme Court struck down the requirement that dual citizens obtain a certificate before exercising their rights, with Justice Akuffo describing the Act 591 exclusions as making a mockery of the Constitution. Then, in May 2024, the Court delivered the decisive blow: in a 6–1 decision, it struck down Parliament's statutory additions to the excluded-offices list as violating Article 289(2) — the Constitution cannot be amended by ordinary Act.

The practical consequence is profound. As of today, a dual citizen may lawfully serve as Chief Justice of the Republic — the final interpreter of the Constitution itself — but may not sit as a backbench MP or serve as Director of Immigration. No theory of loyalty, security, or sovereignty can explain this arrangement. It is not a security architecture; it is rubble.

If anyone doubts what the regime delivers in practice, the case of James Gyakye Quayson, MP for Assin North, is the answer. A born Ghanaian who renounced his Canadian citizenship spent years in litigation over the timing of that renunciation. His election was annulled; his constituents were disenfranchised; a by-election was held — which he won resoundingly; a criminal prosecution followed. Years of judicial time and public money were consumed not by any allegation that he betrayed Ghana, but by paperwork chronology. This is the pattern wherever such rules exist: they never catch traitors; they catch technicalities. As Professor Stephen Kwaku Asare has argued for two decades, Ghana's governance problem has never been dual citizens — it has been greed and corruption, afflictions that carry no passport.

There is also a quietly discriminatory dimension. Children of mixed ECOWAS marriages — a Ghanaian mother, a Nigerian or Togolese father — are frequently dual citizens at birth, whether they know it or not. The current regime disqualifies them from national service for an accident of parentage — an embarrassment to a constitutional order committed to non-discrimination under Article 17.

Ghana is also swimming against the regional current. In May 2025, South Africa's Constitutional Court unanimously struck down the automatic loss of citizenship upon acquiring another nationality. The continental trajectory — Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda — is unmistakably toward inclusion. The Council's advice would place Ghana, long the region's democratic pacesetter, on the trailing edge of a reform it should be leading.

1. The Historical Case: A 1990s Answer to a Question Ghana No Longer Faces

Constitutional provisions are answers to the anxieties of their era. The framers of the 1992 Constitution wrote in the shadow of three decades of coups, in a country hemorrhaging professional abroad, when a Ghanaian in London was functionally gone. In that world, restricting sensitive offices to sole citizens was an intelligible precaution.

Every one of those premises has collapsed. The brain drain the framers feared has matured into a brain bank: an estimated three million Ghanaians abroad now include physicians running NHS departments, engineers at the world's leading technology firms, professors, central bankers, and fund managers. The remittances they send are the single most reliable inflow in Ghana's external accounts — more stable than aid, more patient than portfolio capital. And the state itself has spent years courting this community through the Year of Return and Beyond the Return, campaigns premised on the idea that the diaspora's tie to Ghana is an asset to be deepened, not a taint to be quarantined.

The inconsistency has now become impossible to ignore. Since the Year of Return, Ghana has conferred citizenship on hundreds of African Americans and Caribbean diasporans — men and women born and raised abroad, welcomed at State House ceremonies as brothers and sisters come home, most of whom retain their American or other passports and are therefore dual citizens from the moment they take the oath. Yet a Ghanaian born in Kumasi and raised in Ghana, who acquires an American passport after years of work abroad, is treated as constitutionally suspect. We extend the full embrace of citizenship to those with no birth tie to the soil, while withholding full civic rights from the sons and daughters of the soil itself. No coherent principle of loyalty survives that comparison — and no country can credibly invite the global African family home while telling its own children they returned with one passport too many.

There is also Ghana's own founding history to reckon with. Nkrumah studied at Lincoln and Penn and organized in London; Danquah was called to the English bar; the Big Six were, almost to a person, formed abroad and returned. Pan-Africanism itself — the ideology on which this Republic was proclaimed — is a doctrine of the diaspora; W.E.B. Du Bois died a citizen of Ghana. The claim that transnational attachment dilutes commitment to Ghana is refuted by the biography of every founder whose portrait hangs in our public buildings.

III. The Comparative Case: What Countries Gain When They Open the Door

Dozens of democracies allow dual citizens in legislatures and high office. The evidence of harm is essentially nil; the evidence of benefit is everywhere.

The United Kingdom imposes no bar on MPs or ministers. Boris Johnson held United States citizenship by birth while serving as Mayor of London and into his tenure as Foreign Secretary, renouncing it in 2016 for tax reasons, not loyalty ones.

Canada has entrusted its highest offices to dual citizens: Michaëlle Jean, a dual French-Canadian citizen, served as Governor General — commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces — and Andrew Scheer led the Official Opposition while holding U.S. citizenship. Canada's response has been, correctly, a shrug: performance in office, not paperwork, is the measure of loyalty.

The United States — the most security-obsessed state on earth — permits dual citizens in Congress and Cabinet. Madeleine Albright, born in Prague, served as Secretary of State, and Schwarzenegger governed California while retaining his Austrian citizenship throughout.

Israel, in near-permanent security emergency, allows dual citizens in the Knesset and requires renunciation only upon actually taking a seat — concluding that a broad diaspora bar would amputate its greatest strategic asset.

And within Africa, the lesson repeats. Rwanda openly welcomed dual citizens into the government that rebuilt the country after 1994, much of it returned from the diaspora. Nigeria bars only naturalized dual citizens from elective office — citizens by birth remain fully eligible, a distinction Ghana should study. Liberia enacted dual citizenship in 2022 in explicit recognition that excluding its diaspora was excluding its own reconstruction capital.

Against this record, the bill's opponents can cite no example — none — of a democracy where dual citizens in high office produced the espionage or divided-loyalty crisis the restriction supposedly prevents. The predicted harm has had fifty years and fifty countries in which to materialize. It has not.

Source: Kweku Pumpuni Ofosu