The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa has stated that Ghana deserves commendation for evacuating nearly 2,000 of its citizens who were fleeing xenophobic attacks in from South Africa. He made this point strongly during a one-on-one interview granted on Key Points, a TV3 Talk Show, on 10th October, 2026.<\/p>\n
Responding to reports about renewed tensions in South Africa emerging from a recent decision of their apex court on asylum seekers, the Minister observed that, \u201cit does appear to us that the whole undercurrents of anti-immigrant sentiments continue to remain strong. That is why as a government we must be commended for how proactively we acted\u201d.<\/p>\n
To buttress this point, he noted that, \u201cthere 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\u2019s way. And we can now boldly state that we have successfully evacuated 1,964 Ghanaians\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Minister stressed that, \u201call we did was to make sure that every Ghanaian who felt unsafe, was under attack, who had fled, and there were some who sought refuge in our Mission in Pretoria and in the Pentecost Church (and I have gone personally to commend the Chairman of the Pentecost Church on behalf President Mahama); all those who sought refuge, we have brought them back home\u201d. \u201cSo, being the first country to evacuate (and many others did that subsequently) and making sure that those who voluntarily signed up were evacuated, Ghana deserves to be commended\u201d, he added.<\/p>\n
Hon. Okudzeto Ablakwa pointed out that, there was no discrimination on who was evacuated; \u201cyou don\u2019t have to show a party card, you don\u2019t have to indicate which part of Ghana you are coming from. To us once you are a Ghanaian, you qualify. It is a matter of right\u201d.<\/p>\n
He stressed that, as a Ministry \u201cwe take our consular responsibilities very seriously. Our motto at the Ministry, when it comes to these matters, is that, \u201cwhen you touch one Ghanaian, you touch all of us\u201d.<\/p>\n
Therefore, \u201cany attack on a Ghanaian anywhere in the world is an attack on all of us, and we will immediately mobilise and get our Ghanaians out of harm\u2019s way. So, it is good that we responded swiftly\u201d, he concluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa has stated that Ghana deserves commendation for evacuating nearly 2,000 of its citizens […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7017,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mfa.gov.gh\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mfa.gov.gh\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mfa.gov.gh\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mfa.gov.gh\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mfa.gov.gh\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mfa.gov.gh\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7018,"href":"https:\/\/mfa.gov.gh\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7016\/revisions\/7018"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mfa.gov.gh\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mfa.gov.gh\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mfa.gov.gh\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mfa.gov.gh\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}