As Accra receives its expelled sons and daughters, the tough question is what will happen to the economic sectors they left behind and whether South Africa's self-inflicted wounds will heal.
The patriotic songs playing through the speakers at the Accra International Airport on Wednesday had a bittersweet tone. A plane carrying 300 Ghanaian nationals evacuated from South Africa due to anti-immigration protests has landed in Accra, with the group including women and children arriving after weeks of rising xenophobia that has left migrants facing harassment, job loss and violence.
Ghana's Foreign Minister Samuel Okudjato Ablakwa was there to welcome him, but his presence, though reassuring, could not hide the significance of a moment that was an unwitting revelation of a decades-long African migration story.
There were no returning tourists who had overstayed their welcome. They were breadwinners, traders, artisans and entrepreneurs who made livelihoods thousands of kilometers away from home, but were driven back by a tide of fear that their host country insists is not xenophobia.
The South African government has rejected all signs of xenophobia, with presidential spokesman Vincent Magwenya telling reporters that South Africans are not xenophobic and describing the protests as “Pockets of protest” Permitted within the constitutional framework.
Magwenya went even further, shifting his analytical focus from domestic bias to what he described as widespread structural failures across the continent, leading to conflict, instability and “wrong government” Driving waves of migration.
This is a convenient distraction. There is a grain of truth in this but not in the way Pretoria wants.
pressure behind the protest
The recurring xenophobic cycle in South Africa is not born out of cultural hatred alone. They are the political expression of an economy that has failed its own people. Unemployment is running at 30 percent, giving rise to a zero-sum perception of economic survival among disadvantaged locals, blaming migrants for a shortfall that is actually a product of the structural failure of the post-apartheid decades.
The scapegoat is an expatriate businessman from Johannesburg; The real villain is the economic model that left millions of black South Africans behind even after liberation.
This displacement crisis fits into a well-documented historical cycle. 62 people were killed in 2008, in the worst violence against immigrants in the post-apartheid era. The structural drivers of that disaster were never fully resolved, leading to violent clashes again in 2015, 2016 and 2019.
Every time African governments have lodged diplomatic protests. Each time, South Africa has issued a partial apology. Each time, the cycle starts again.
This time, Ghana has acted differently, not just with rhetoric, but with aircraft.
Withdrawal and what is its cost Ghana
Of the estimated 25,000 Ghanaians currently living in South Africa, hundreds of them abandoned their livelihoods in search of safety back home. South Africa's border management authority revealed that on Wednesday about 90 percent of travelers were undocumented, with most overstaying their visas for more than 30 days and some staying for a year or more. However, Ghana's High Commissioner to South Africa, Benjamin Kweshi, placed some of the blame on Pretoria, and criticized South African authorities for the backlog in immigration processing for people wishing to renew their permits.
The economic consequences of this forced repatriation are not trivial. For decades, the Ghanaian diaspora in South Africa served as a vital financial lifeline, sending millions of dollars home annually, which directly funded local real estate development, family health care, and school fees in areas such as Greater Accra and Ashanti. The sudden severance of those income streams is not just a personal tragedy for individual families, it is a macroeconomic blow to a country that is already managing a complex post-IMF recovery.
The government is aware of this. Foreign Minister Ablakwa announced psycho-social support and financial reintegration packages for returnees (Vanguard News), while High Commissioner Kwashi said the government was ready to repatriate those who were engaged in whatever business they were doing while in South Africa.
Good intentions. Testing will take place in delivery.
South Africa has not answered the question: who fills the void?
Here is a dimension of the crisis that Pretoria spokesmen have not publicly acknowledged: the economic spaces vacated by Ghanaians and Nigerians, Zimbabweans and Malawians facing similar pressures do not simply disappear. Markets hate a vacuum. Hairdressing salons, wholesale food stalls, informal logistics networks and cross-border trade operations will fill them.
The uncomfortable irony that South Africans have never fully confronted xenophobia is that many of the occupational roles occupied by immigrants exist precisely because local South Africans did not occupy them. Migrant entrepreneurs often set up businesses in underserved townships and peri-urban areas where formal capital and corporate investment never reached. They served a population that was ignored by formal South Africa. Their removal, far from opening up jobs for locals, is more likely to create service deserts that will be filled not by struggling South African youth but by migrants from a different geography, or by large corporate interests moving into the cleared area.
Pan-African ideals are increasingly colliding with economic realities and the result is outrage across the continent in the form of constitutional protests.
Ghana's tough calculations
The returnees deserve a welcome as they sing on the tarmac in Accra. But the Ghanaian government must now ask itself an equally uncomfortable question: why did 25,000 Ghanaians need to live in South Africa in the first place?
Remittances remain important to Ghana's domestic economy, tripling the country's official development assistance to $4.6 billion in 2022.
This figure does not reflect charity, it reflects the productive labor of Ghanaians who could not find comparable economic opportunity at home and were forced to seek it thousands of kilometers away in a country that ultimately did not want them.
Repatriation flights are an essential function of statecraft. They are also an implicit indictment of the structural conditions of home that made departure attractive in the first place. Government reintegration packages, if properly funded and implemented, offer a rare opportunity: redirecting skilled and experienced workers who had built businesses in one of Africa's most competitive markets back into Ghana's own economy.
Returnees know how to survive in tough markets. They understand supply chains, informal credit networks and cross-border commerce. Ghana should not treat them as rescued victims but as property returnees.
widespread african failure
The latest tensions have revived uneasy debates across Africa about xenophobia, migration and the gap between pan-African rhetoric and the realities facing migrants on the ground. The African Union's vision of establishing a continent in which Africans move freely across borders, invest in each other's economies and build shared prosperity is being systematically destroyed not by external enemies but by internal contradictions: unemployment, governance failure and scapegoating politics.
South Africa, once the moral pinnacle of Africa's liberation struggle, is now in increasing danger of becoming the continent's most visible rebuke to Pan-Africanism. It received the solidarity of the entire continent during the anti-apartheid struggle. Now it responds to that history by expelling the descendants of those who stood by it.
Ghanaians who landed in Accra on Wednesday evening were not required to stay there. They needed to live in a South Africa that respected its African commitments, or in a Ghana that gave them good reasons to stay. Both countries have some calculations to settle.
Foreign Minister Abalakwa's words at the airport “If you mess with Ghanaians anywhere in the world, thinking they are orphans or that nobody cares about them, you are wrong” These were the right words for this moment. The hard words that Ghana and Africa must now speak to themselves are about why this moment keeps happening and what structural changes will ensure that it does not happen again.
Kotoka's songs were patriotic. The policy response must be practical.
Mustafa Batur Salma.
Medical/Science Communicator,
Private investigator, criminal investigation and intelligence analysis.
International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP
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