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Certain pronouncements and posturing of some leading figures of the opposition New Patriotic Party over the ongoing debate on the country’s voter register ahead of the 2016 elections has triggered intense fear and panic among many Ghanaians of foreign descent.

These persons, The aL-hAJJ has gathered, are of the view that a Nana Akufo-Addo government was likely to repeat what his party’s forebear, Progress Party (PP) government under Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia did to their ancestors after the 1969 elections, where persons suspected to be non-Ghanaian were forcefully repatriated under a law; The Aliens Compliance Order.

Though it has been 45 years since NPP forebears rolled out this dreadful ethnocentric policy, the fear of the Ghanaians of foreign descent was further heightened by the much vaunted statements by Nana Akufo-Addo and some leading members of the NPP to the effect that “we don’t want an ECOWAS register.”

To them, what the NPP is seeking to do is to deny non-Akans the right to register and vote in certain parts of the country in the upcoming polls, a development they say reminds them of “what Busia and his Progress Party did to our great grandparents,” Alhassan Traorere of Burkina descent told The aL-hAJJ.

Commenting on the need for the Electoral Commission to compile a new register for the 2016 elections, Nana Akufo-Addo recently stated that any attempt to defend the registration of foreign nationals despite evidence submitted should be discouraged.

“We don’t want a West African election, we want a Ghanaian election. We only want an election of Ghanaian people who are entitled to vote,” he stressed.

The NPP led by its 2016 flag bearer at a recent media briefing stated that about 76000 alleged Togolese nationals have their names in Ghana’s voter register.

These instances among others, the party said, have strengthened their calls for a revision of the voter’s register in the build up to the 2016 general elections.

Several communicators of the party have also given the clearest indication that the NPP will prevent non-Akans they suspect to be foreigners from registering if the EC yields to the NPP’s demand to compile a new register.

However, many Ghanaians whose parents were declared ‘aliens’ and who believed they are more likely to be affected by the NPP’s intended action say their great grand parents lived and gave birth to their grandparents and their fathers long before Ghana attained independence.
This, they said, qualify them as Ghanaians, but with the present NPP mantra and obsession with everything about foreigners, they fear an Akufo-Addo-led government will sidestep ECOWAS protocols and drive them away like Busia did in 1970.

To prevent this from happening, they have vowed to punish Nana Akufo-Addo and the NPP at the 2016 polls. “We are not going to sit down and allow someone who thinks he is more Ghanaian than us because of his tribe to drive us away from the land of our birth or deny us the opportunity to vote in our own country,” one of them Osman Mohamed of Nima noted.

They are also reported to have decided to organize themselves into groups to move into the Zongos and the countryside to vigorously campaign against Nana Akufo-Addo ahead of the 2016 elections.

“The only way to prevent a repeat of what Busia did to our great grandparents 45 years ago is to campaign against Nana Akufo-Addo and stop him from becoming President…and I tell you we are ready to do that,” one of them stated.