Minority alleges GH ₵16.4m Missing in SA evacuation

The Minority in Parliament has accused the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, of failing to account for GH₵16,423,470, nearly one-third of the GH₵49.7 million spent to evacuate Ghanaians from South Africa, and is demanding an independent forensic audit of the entire exercise.

In a statement delivered yesterday by Nana Asafo-Adjei Ayeh, MP for Bosome-Freho and Deputy Ranking Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Minority said a painstaking, name-by-name review of records the Minister himself submitted in response to a Right to Information (RTI) request revealed serious gaps that cannot be explained away.

At the centre of the allegations is a question ofhow many people were actually evacuated, and how much was actually spent on them?

The Minister has told Parliament that 1,964 Ghanaians were brought home after fleeing xenophobic attacks in South Africa, each receiving a GH₵5,000 reintegration grant and a GH₵500 transport allowance. But the Minority says the paperwork does not support that claim.

According to the statement, only 824 people can be confirmed by matching names on both payment registers to have received both packages. That leaves 1,140 evacuees unaccounted for, representing GH₵6,270,000.

On flights, the Minister said GH₵9,420,463.68 was spent on tickets and layover expenses, with 926 people flown home on chartered flights and the remaining 1,038 on commercial flights. But the Minority says only 247 commercial-flight passengers can actually be traced in the documents. That puts the confirmed total at 1,173 evacuees,  not 1,964 leaving 791 people and GH₵7,179,116 in flight costs unexplained.

Combined, the Minority puts the unaccounted sum at GH₵13,449,116, or 27 per cent of the total budget.

The statement also flagged what it called troubling anomalies in the annexes attached to the Minister’s RTI response.

The Minority says 1,708 people signed for the GHS5,000 package, but only 1,001 signed for the GH₵500 allowance which a gap of 707 names that ought not to exist if every evacuee was entitled to both.

It also identified 442 minors on the GHS5,000 register and questioned whether they were paid directly, through a guardian, or at all. At GH₵5,500 per head, that amounts to GH₵2,431,000 with no documented safeguarding arrangement, the statement said.

Duplicate names, the Minority added, run across three separate sets of records — reintegration, transport and flight manifests — raising the possibility that the numbers were inflated. It valued the duplicated entries at a further GH₵543,354.

Taken together, the Minority now puts total unexplained expenditure at GH₵16,423,470.

“Either the Minister has failed to place before Parliament and the Ghanaian public the full and complete details of the evacuation exercise, or the number of persons evacuated and the expenditure incurred has been overstated,” Hon. Ayeh said. “Either explanation is unacceptable.”

The Minority is calling for a full independent audit by an internationally recognised firm with terms of reference and findings made public. It described the Minister’s own invitation to the Auditor-General as welcome but insufficient given the scale of the discrepancies.

The Minister has previously said he welcomes scrutiny of the exercise, which he has described as a necessary and humane response to the xenophobic violence that forced hundreds of Ghanaians to flee South Africa.

But the Minority insists the goodwill of Ghanaians, and their money, must not be taken for granted.

“The Minority will not relent in holding the Ministry of Foreign Affairs accountable for every cedi spent,” Hon. Nana Asafo-Adjei Ayehsaid.