While diplomats and locals alike repeat the mantra “Ghanaians and Nigerians are brothers”, in Accra’s major market centres, this bond of regional brotherhood is severely strained.
The Ghanaian capital’s sprawling Abossey Okai spare parts market, where Ghanaian, Nigerian, and other foreign traders operate inches apart, is now in a state of constant tension. Nigerians – the market’s single largest group of foreign retailers – are finding their businesses systematically locked up by frustrated local trade unions.
The friction is part of a historical pattern of retaliatory policy between the two West African nations. While the 1983 ‘Ghana Must Go’ expulsion from Nigeria is famous, the precedent for mass deportation was set by Ghana more than a decade earlier. In 1969, Ghana invoked the Aliens Compliance Order to remove millions of migrants, mostly Nigerians, citing their dominance in the local economy. This was followed in 1979 by state-led ‘house-cleaning’ exercises that targeted the retail class, effectively shifting much of the trade into the informal sector.
