African nationals are facing simultaneous expulsion pressures on two fronts: a hard deportation deadline from Cambodia and escalating xenophobic violence in South Africa, and the crisis is sharpening a domestic conversation in Ghana about whether the country’s political class is doing enough to make the nation a place its citizens choose to stay rather than one they feel compelled to leave.
Cambodia this week ordered all African nationals, naming citizens of Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon, Uganda, and others, to leave on or before May 31, 2026, warning that anyone remaining from June 1 would face a two-year jail term and a US$8,000 penalty. The notice has drawn widespread condemnation for its tone and sweep.
In South Africa, a citizen-led movement called “March and March” organised anti-immigrant demonstrations across Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Durban in April and May 2026, with violent and sometimes fatal results. Ghana responded by summoning South Africa’s acting high commissioner and moving to repatriate its citizens, framing both actions as a response to what Accra described as a betrayal of the African solidarity Ghana demonstrated during the anti-apartheid struggle.
Public opinion data from the Human Sciences Research Council showed that the proportion of South Africans willing to welcome all foreigners fell from 26 percent in 2021 to just 15 percent in 2025, while the share holding hostile positions rose from 30 percent to 42 percent over the same period.
Many Ghanaians observing both crises have arrived at a blunter domestic argument: that the migration pressure driving citizens toward hostile environments abroad is itself a governance failure at home. Civil society voices and commentators have grown more insistent in their call for the political class to treat national development as a non-partisan obligation rather than an instrument of electoral competition.
The recurring frustration, expressed across platforms and public discourse, is that successive governments have allowed political rivalry to “disrupt development initiatives” that would otherwise create conditions under which citizens can build viable livelihoods without leaving.
Observers tracking Ghana’s political cycle have described the country’s challenge not as a leadership deficit alone but as a systemic pattern in which “real development is not about swapping governments every four years” but about “cultivating a society that values long-term solutions over short-term victories,” with both citizens and political actors sharing accountability for the pace of transformation.
The argument gaining currency is that Ghana must be “fixed” by Ghanaians, beginning with a government willing to subordinate political interests to structural reform.
The electoral mandate that returned President John Dramani Mahama to office in December 2024 has been described by analysts as “more than an electoral outcome”, framed as a “national call for a reset in leadership, governance and public trust.”
The mandate now faces its most consequential moment: delivering the kind of durable institutional change that reduces the conditions pushing Ghanaians abroad in the first place.
Political analysts have argued that a reset agenda, which “improves the country’s economy, strengthens its key governing institutions and makes significant progress in the fight against corruption”, would receive broad public support, but that the reverse, an agenda that weakens institutions or defaults to partisan conduct, would trigger an equal and opposite reaction.
Research into Ghana’s democratic model has suggested that “political differences should not create division or hostility among leaders and citizens” and that, despite belonging to different political sides, leaders “must work together in the interest of national development.”
It is a principle that Ghanaians are invoking not as an aspiration but as an immediate demand, one made more urgent by the sight of their compatriots being ordered out of Cambodia and attacked in South African townships.
The message from the ground is pointed: “fix” the country so that its people have a reason to stay, and a country worth returning to.
