Minority’s evacuation figures contain ‘total inconsistencies’ – Foreign Affairs Ministry

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has challenged the Minority in Parliament’s figures on the GH¢49.72 million spent on evacuating Ghanaians from South Africa, accusing the caucus of inconsistencies in its analysis of the expenditure records.

Fred Duhoe, Media Relations Officer for the ministry, said the Minority had double-counted some evacuees when calculating the number of people whose payments allegedly required further explanation.

The dispute follows the Minority’s demand for an independent audit of the GH¢49.72 million spent on evacuating 1,964 Ghanaians from South Africa between May 27 and September 4, 2026, following xenophobic attacks.

After reviewing documents obtained from the ministry through a Right to Information request, the caucus alleged discrepancies in beneficiary payment registers, flight manifests and other expenditure records.

It estimated that GH¢16.4 million required further explanation and called for a comprehensive audit of the exercise.

Speaking on Accra-based TV3 on Monday, October 19, Duhoe described the caucus’s conclusions as misleading and stated that its figures did not support the allegations it had raised.

“There are total inconsistencies in what the Minority is arguing about, completely disingenuous. They just want to put out figures and hope that we would follow them and be explaining issues,” he said.

Duhoe explained that the Minority had relied on separate calculations involving beneficiary payment records and flight manifests, which he argued led to overlapping figures.

He said the caucus had identified 824 people in one set of records and used that figure to calculate the number of evacuees whose payments required explanation.

It subsequently relied on figures of 926 passengers on chartered flights and 247 on commercial flights to raise further questions about the total number of evacuees.

According to Mr Duhoe, the calculations failed to account for the possibility that some people identified in the different records were the same individuals.

He also presented what he described as original records from the first evacuation flight, dated May 27, 2026, to support the ministry’s position on the documentation used during the exercise.

Duhoe said the initial records contained beneficiaries’ names, travel document numbers and telephone numbers but did not include details such as dates of birth and sex.

He explained that additional personal information was incorporated into records for subsequent evacuations as the ministry’s documentation requirements evolved.