Blame President Mahama for Threat of US Visa Restrictions

The threat by the United States of America’s Department of State, or Foreign Ministry, to place a visa embargo on Ghanaian citizens wishing to travel to the United States, either on official business or for migration purposes, unless Ghana promptly issues travel documents to some undocumented (or illegal) migrants resident in the United States claiming to be of Ghanaian descent or citizenship, who are scheduled for deportation from the United States, may very well have been made easier by the grossly inadvisable decision secretly made by the outgone Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to accept the two Saudi-born Yemeni terror suspects detained by the United States military on Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay’s Maximum-Security Prison, largely at the Ghanaian taxpayer’s expense. Well, the Americans are primarily worried about the humongous cost of chartering airplanes to fly out these deportees, instead of having them shipped out via regular commercial flights.

You see, what this dangerous precedent set is that it gave the Americans the wrong impression that Ghanaian leaders were some toadies or diplomatic pushovers who could just be ordered about at whim, especially with such threat coming on the heels of President Donald John Trump’s flagrantly disdainful characterization of African and other Third-World nations as “shithole countries.” So far, the approach taken by the Akufo-Addo-led Administration of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a step in the right direction, and one that is likely to put Ghana, once again, back on the international radar of dignified respectability.

Indeed, it is ironic that a global Superpower nation that just recently unilaterally withdrew from the International Human Right Convention/Organization, on grounds that the signatories of this globally respected establishment have been perennially and consistently biased in the judgment and attitude towards Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, for the most part, would have the Ghanaian government act against its own best interests by slavishly kowtowing to the morbidly and pathologically self-centered and self-interested foreign policy agenda of the Alt-Right Trump Government.

What the Ghanaians are asking for in the bargain is very simple; they want the Trump Government’s operatives to objectively and scientifically determine the purported Ghanaian identity of all the 6,000, or so, designated deportees before Ghana’s diplomatic missions in the United States could legitimately issue these deportees with travel documents. This is what Ghana’s Foreign Minister, Ms. Shirely Ayorkor Botchwey, had to say in measured response to the US Foreign Ministry or the State Department: “[Ghana’s] Ministry [of Foreign Affairs] wishes to place on record that it continues to engage its Missions in the United States of America on the matter and has already communicated their concerns to the US Embassy in Ghana about the need to do due diligence and establish the nationalities of the deportees before they are issued with travel documents” (“Prove Deportees Are Ghanaians – Government Tells US” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/22/18).

In other words, what Ghana’s Chief Diplomat is saying here is that her country will not automatically or knee-jerkily issue the Trump-designated deportees with travel documents merely because the powerbrokers in Washington, DC, say so. Rather, what the relevant officials of the US’ State Department need to do is furnish their Ghanaian counterparts with forensically uncontestable proof of their Ghanaian identity and citizenship of the designated deportees. We also need to categorically underscore the fact that as a people, Ghanaians have much deeper roots in the foundation and development of Modern America, or the United States, than the half-Scottish and half-German President Trump. We came here in the 1400s to do the bulk of the most backbreaking and dirty work of the proverbial “Peculiar Institution,” when Mr. Trump’s genius and superhuman Norwegians would have absolutely nothing to do with the same.

You see, we have a bounden obligation, first and foremost as Ghanaians, and then as Africans, to constantly remind these snooty ultra-conservative neo-Nazi current rulers of the United States that there is far more to America than the fact of who carries the vote of the patently bizarre and obsolescent Electoral College in any particular presidential election cycle. As well, it is the “essence,” not the “veneer,” that makes America what it is to the global psyche and imagination. And that essence goes farther deep-down than two generations of nativity, vehement Trumpian protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
June 23, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]