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Ace Annan Ankomah, a private legal practitioner, has proffered four reasons why Ghana cannot give the British government a taste of their own medicine, with respect to the announced demand for Pounds 3000 bond before issuing visas to "high risk" Ghanaians. On his facebook wall, the Senior Lecturer at the Ghana Law School wrote; �I have thought a bit about the story that Britain is going to demand the equivalent of GHc 9,000 as a bond before issuing visas to "high risk" Ghanaians. Coming in the wake of the "historic" and "G8" meeting between our President and the British Prime Minister, the content and timing of this announcement by Theresa May could not have been more unfortunate and disrespectful of us. My initial reaction was to urge a tit-for-tat stance by our government: let them pay the same amount for Ghana visas. But I won't, for 4 key reasons. First, we just can't. Look at our mentality. We refer to Britain still as "our colonial masters". We don't even bother to qualify that self-humiliating, self-deprecating term with the adjective "former". Many of us do not just think lowly of ourselves, we don't think of ourselves at all! You want to know how many times security officers directing affairs just infront of the X-Ray scanners at Kotoka Airport (those guys in white T Shirt with some name tag hanging on their necks) take one look at my black face and signal that I should join the other, longer line because this line is for "business class" (read "white") passengers only? Nobody ever does that to me at Heathrow, but in Ghana... The Good Book says "as a man [and woman] thinketh in his [or her] heart..." Second (and actually flowing from the first point), our status as a low middle income, 'beggar' nation (a living, walking contradiction or oxymoron, to be kind), means that we do not have the cojones to bite Britain back. Notice how we were excitedly told that the President had returned from Britain with some "goodies", that Britain was going to transform Ghana from something into something else? And I hear that we are still on annual budgetary support from Britain. If so, toom dah! We cannot do it even if we want to; and that is where I begin to admire Nigeria all over again. Third, the vast majority of people trooping to 104 Highgate Hill, London N6 5HE for Ghana visas, are our own kith and kin, who have become 'British', coming 'home' for holidays, innit? They own homes here, and support parents and other family here. They are the ones who would be hurt most if we retaliated, unless we are going to have an 'unwritten' policy where they don't have to post a bond, but others would be required to. That would be messy. Fourth, if all it will take to get a British visa is depositing GHS9000 as a so-called bond, when one would simply have been refused a visa in the past, then so be it. Tweaa, in the first year, Britain would earn GHS9,000,000,000 in unclaimed bonds from Ghana, and will have to deal with a million of my people showing up in Britain to fight for the jobs that the Polish and other Eastern Europeans have taken from our people there!!