MINORITY FLAGS GH¢16.4M GAP IN ABLAKWA’S GH¢49.7M SOUTH AFRICA EVACUATION BILL

Ghana’s parliamentary Minority has raised fresh questions over the GH¢49.72 million spent by the government on the evacuation of Ghanaians from South Africa, alleging that records supplied by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs contain inconsistencies and documentation gaps involving more than GH¢16.4 million, and calling for an independent audit to determine whether the expenditure can be fully reconciled.

The challenge was mounted by Nana Asafo-Adjei Ayeh, the New Patriotic Party Member of Parliament for Bosome-Freho and Deputy Ranking Member on Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration Committee, who said the Minority arrived at its figures after reviewing more than 200 pages of documents released by the Foreign Affairs Ministry in response to a Right to Information request. According to the Minority, the records contain discrepancies involving reintegration grants, transportation allowances, commercial airline passengers, duplicate names, unsigned entries and payments linked to minors.

The dispute centers on the government’s evacuation of 1,964 Ghanaians from South Africa between May 27 and September 4, 2026, following a period of xenophobic attacks and security concerns affecting foreign nationals. Foreign Affairs Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa announced on September 7 that the operation had cost GH¢49,721,786 and said the full amount had been settled, with no outstanding liabilities remaining from the exercise.

According to the government’s breakdown, GH¢38,835,512 was spent on chartered flights, commercial airline tickets, ground transportation, feeding, hotel accommodation, medical care and hospitalization in South Africa. Another GH¢10,802,000 was allocated to reintegration and transportation allowances for the evacuees, while GH¢84,274 was used to repatriate the mortal remains of two Ghanaians who died during the crisis.

Ablakwa also disclosed that the government directly financed GH¢33,721,786 of the overall expenditure, while Engineers and Planners, a company owned by businessman Ibrahim Mahama, contributed GH¢16 million toward the evacuation. Each of the 1,964 returnees was said to have received GH¢5,000 as a reintegration grant and an additional GH¢500 for transportation, giving each beneficiary GH¢5,500 and producing the GH¢10.802 million figure announced by the Ministry.

The Minority says its review of the documents supplied by the Ministry does not fully support those figures. Asafo-Adjei Ayeh said that after comparing the registers used for the GH¢5,000 reintegration payments with those used for the GH¢500 transportation allowances, the Minority was able to match only 824 names across both sets of records against the official total of 1,964 evacuees.

On that basis, the Minority argues that the records it reviewed leave 1,140 people whose combined GH¢5,500 packages require further documentary explanation. At GH¢5,500 per person, the caucus calculated the amount requiring additional reconciliation at approximately GH¢6.27 million.

The allegation does not establish that GH¢6.27 million was stolen, diverted or improperly paid. It reflects the Minority’s claim that the documents supplied to it do not contain sufficient matching records to account for the full number of people the government says received the payments. Additional payment records, bank documentation, signatures or other supporting documents could potentially resolve some or all of the difference, but those materials were not publicly available in the Minority’s presentation.

The second major area of dispute involves flight records. The Minority said the documents it examined identified 926 evacuees who returned to Ghana on chartered flights. If that figure is deducted from the government’s official total of 1,964 evacuees, it would leave 1,038 people who would have had to return on commercial flights.

The Minority says, however, that the commercial flight documents supplied to it contained identifiable records for only 247 passengers. When those 247 passengers are added to the 926 people recorded on chartered flights, the total reaches 1,173, leaving 791 people unaccounted for in the flight documentation reviewed by the caucus.

Using the Ministry’s reported commercial airfare expenditure of GH¢9,420,463.68 and an estimated average ticket price of about GH¢9,076 for each of the 1,038 people believed to have traveled commercially, the Minority calculated that approximately GH¢7.18 million in airfare expenditure requires further clarification.

When the alleged GH¢6.27 million gap in reintegration and transport records is combined with the GH¢7.18 million in disputed commercial flight documentation, the Minority arrives at approximately GH¢13.44 million that it says cannot yet be fully reconciled from the records supplied.

The caucus then added concerns about duplicate names, entries it said were blank or unsigned and payments connected to minors. Asafo-Adjei Ayeh said the Minority found 36 repeated names on one page of the reintegration register and six more on another, together with repetitions in the transport register and at least one flight manifest.

Duplicate names in administrative records do not in themselves prove duplicate payments were made. Determining whether the repeated entries represented clerical errors, duplicated documentation or actual multiple payments would require examination of transaction records, receipts, bank details or other payment evidence. The Minority’s position is that the irregularities are sufficiently significant to justify an independent audit rather than relying on the Ministry’s internal records alone.

Questions were also raised over payments involving minors. According to the Minority’s manual count, 442 minors appeared in the reintegration register. At GH¢5,500 per beneficiary, the amount associated with those children would be approximately GH¢2.43 million.

The Minority has not argued that children were necessarily ineligible to receive reintegration assistance. Its concern is instead focused on how those payments were administered, whether the money was received by parents or guardians and whether the available records clearly establish who collected funds on behalf of the minors.

After incorporating the issues involving payment registers, flight records, duplicate entries and minors, the Minority placed the total amount requiring further reconciliation at GH¢16,423,470, representing roughly one third of the government’s announced GH¢49.72 million expenditure.

There is, however, an additional discrepancy within the Minority’s own presentation. One portion of its public account cited GH¢16,423,470 as the amount requiring further explanation, while another figure of GH¢16,302,586 was also referenced, creating a difference of GH¢120,884. That inconsistency does not invalidate the Minority’s broader request for an audit, but it reinforces the need for the competing calculations to be examined independently before definitive conclusions are reached.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry had earlier provided the Minority with more than 200 pages of information after Asafo-Adjei Ayeh filed an RTI request seeking itemized expenditure, passenger information, flight manifests, procurement records and documentation showing how the evacuation was funded. The Ministry’s response was submitted electronically on September 18 and was reported to contain information on more than 1,900 evacuees, including contact details and signatures.

The release of those documents followed earlier demands by the Minority for detailed evidence supporting the expenditure announced by Ablakwa. After the Minister disclosed the GH¢49.72 million total on September 7, opposition lawmakers argued that the headline figure alone was insufficient and called for records that would allow Parliament and the public to independently verify how the money was spent.

The evacuation itself was undertaken during a period of heightened concern for Ghanaians living in South Africa following reports of xenophobic attacks and threats against foreign nationals. The government organized a combination of chartered and commercial flights, with the first evacuation operations beginning in late May and the final group of 41 evacuees arriving in Ghana on September 4.

The government has maintained that the operation was completed successfully and that returning citizens received financial assistance to support their reintegration. Officials have also said additional reintegration initiatives were being developed for returnees who required help finding employment or restarting businesses after leaving South Africa.

The current dispute therefore does not center on whether an evacuation occurred or whether substantial public and private funds were spent. Those facts are not in dispute. The political and accounting question is whether the documentation released by the Ministry fully supports the numbers announced by the government and whether every expenditure can be traced to an identifiable beneficiary, passenger, service provider or transaction.

For the Minority, the answer cannot yet be determined from the documents it reviewed. Asafo-Adjei Ayeh has called for an independent accounting firm to examine the expenditure and has said the terms of reference and eventual findings should be made public. The caucus argues that the size of the alleged discrepancies and the public interest surrounding the evacuation justify scrutiny beyond the Ministry’s own records.

The government, meanwhile, has previously presented the GH¢49.72 million figure as a full accounting of the operation and has stated that the expenditure covered the costs of transportation, accommodation, feeding, medical care, reintegration assistance and the return of deceased citizens. A detailed response addressing each of the Minority’s latest calculations had not been publicly reported at the time the allegations emerged.

That response will be important because several of the Minority’s claims could potentially be resolved through supporting records that were omitted from, or not clearly reflected in, the documents it examined. Flight bookings may contain group arrangements or records presented differently from passenger manifests, while payment records involving minors may legitimately show guardians rather than children as recipients. Duplicate entries may also reflect documentation errors rather than multiple disbursements. Those possibilities, however, require evidence rather than assumption.

At the same time, the Minority’s findings raise legitimate questions about whether public expenditure of this scale was documented in a way that allows straightforward independent verification. Where government announces detailed figures involving thousands of beneficiaries, multiple flights and tens of millions of cedis, the strength of the accounting depends not only on the total amount disclosed but also on whether the underlying records consistently reconcile with that total.

The controversy is now likely to shift from political claims to documentary evidence. An audit would have to establish the actual number of evacuees carried on each chartered and commercial flight, identify the payment trail for the GH¢5,000 reintegration grants and GH¢500 transport allowances, determine how payments involving minors were handled and establish whether repeated names in the records corresponded to duplicate disbursements or administrative errors.

Until that work is completed, the GH¢16.4 million figure should be treated as an amount the Minority says requires further reconciliation, not as money proven to have disappeared. Equally, the Ministry’s GH¢49.72 million accounting remains subject to scrutiny because the opposition’s analysis has identified questions that have not yet been answered publicly in detail.

The immediate next step is therefore likely to be a formal response from the Foreign Affairs Ministry or an independent examination of the records. The government has already disclosed the broad structure of the evacuation expenditure, and the Minority has now challenged parts of the supporting documentation. What remains unresolved is whether the apparent gaps can be explained through additional records or whether an audit will establish substantive weaknesses in how the operation was documented and accounted for.