By Justice A. Newton-Offei
If I was the President of Ghana, I would send chartered flights to South Africa; airlift every Ghanaian that needs to be brought home; declare the South African High Commissioner in Ghana a persona non-grata and given 24 hours to leave; recall Ghana’s High Commissioner to South Africa; and cut diplomatic ties with them.
These South African riffraff, over the years, have engaged in such criminal habits of nonsensical crudity, by physically attacking, harming, and murdering fellow Africans who have travelled there in search of work and other reasons. And anytime such acts of hellacious despicability happen, South African authorities turn a blind eye.
I first traveled to South Africa in 2018, and my altercations with uncivilized South Africans began, when I landed at Oliver Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg. Immigration officer whose prime duty was just to stamp my passport and wave me to pass, tried posing silly and irrelevant questions, and I shouted at him to get off!!!
At the carousel section to pick up my luggage, a dirty, smelly and rotten teeth lady in security uniform tried to order me about, and I shouted at her to go home, take a proper bath, brush her teeth, and apply some perfume. And she got lost. These categories of South Africans that engage in such acts of despicable criminalities are mostly irredeemable junkies.
I have told this story severally: during my training at the School of Medical Radiography at the School of Allied Health Sciences at Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in the mid-80s, we had a lot of these South Africans as refugees being educated and provided with all privileges for free by the Government of Ghana, at the cost of ordinary Ghanaian taxpayer.
Those were the days where Joe Coffie of blessed memory, had a mid-afternoon program on GBC radio called DOWN SOUTH, primarily, threw light on the ills of the demonic White minority Apartheid regime of South Africa. He played South African liberation music of Hugh Masakela, Miriam Makeba, Labi Siffre, Lady Smith Black Mambazo, and so on.
We were accommodated at the hostel directly opposite what used to be the Korle-Bu Mobil Filling Station, and my room number was 50 on the East Wing of the first floor. And what even makes my blood boil with these xenophobic attacks by South Africans on fellow Africans, is how their refugees were made to feel exceptionally comfortable in Ghana.
They dated the best of our Ghanaian ladies from the adjoining communities as Korle-Gonno, Mamprobi, Mataheko, Akoto-Lantey, and so on. Most of them actually impregnated and had babies with our ladies, but absconded when apartheid rule ended and were free to go back. Some of these ladies used to come to us and complain.
But what we could only do at the time, was directing them to the South African High Commission to lay their complaints so the High Commissioner could follow up with the tracing of those Casanova absconders. Some of the ladies were lucky to trace the guys, while the majority were bequeathed with kids of unknown fathers. And such crude ingrates say what?
Zimbabwe, under the late Robert Mugabe was, literally, the home of exiled South Africans chased out by the apartheid regime. Zimbabwe was the place where Paul Simon’s globally acclaimed Graceland Concert featured prominent South African musicians as Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masakela, and Lady Smith Black Mambazo led by Joseph Shabalala.
My fellow Ghanaians: to have experience abroad is good. But the mindset that until we travel, there can never be hope for us here at home, is something we must jettison because there is no place like home. When you are abroad working and earning what you deem good money compared to Ghana, bills and racism will dissipate your happiness.
To the political leadership: you are provided with all the comfort under the sun, just to think and come up with policies and programs to make the life of the ordinary citizens meaningful and worthwhile. Enjoying all the freebies being paid for by the people, but thinking only about your family and close associates, brings irreversible curse.
Justice A. Newton-Offei
newtonoffeija@gmail.com
