Ghana’s High Commissioner to South Africa, Ben Quarshie, has admitted errors in records of Ghanaians repatriated from the country, attributing most of the discrepancies to clerical mistakes by South Africa’s Border Management Authority.
Speaking on JoyNews during a discussion on the audit of the evacuation exercise, Quarshie said some passengers’ passport expiry dates had been mistakenly recorded as their dates of birth.
“Let me admit that most of it, if not all of it, were just to do with clerical mistakes,” he said.
Quarshie disclosed that the High Commission had identified 15 affected records, one more than the 14 initially reported by Joy FM.
He explained that South Africa’s Border Management Authority prepares a document known as a “body receipt”, which lists passengers handed over to an airline for repatriation.
According to him, the High Commission detected the errors in the document and wrote to the South African agency requesting corrections.
“We realised these mistakes, and we wrote to them that they had interchanged the expiry date with the date of birth,” he said.
However, the High Commission forwarded the records to Ghana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs without correcting them, explaining that the documents had been supplied by the South African authority in PDF format.
Quarshie said the records were subsequently used by the ministry in publishing the names of the repatriated Ghanaians.
He maintained that the errors originated from South Africa’s Border Management Authority rather than the High Commission, although he acknowledged the concerns raised by the discrepancies.
“This was not basically an error at our doorstep. It came from the Border Management Authority,” he said.
