Ghana’s High Commissioner to South Africa, Ben Quarshie, has acknowledged errors in the records of Ghanaians repatriated from South Africa, saying most were clerical mistakes originating from that country’s Border Management Authority.
Speaking on JoyNews during a discussion on the evacuation audit, he explained that passport expiry dates had been mistakenly entered as dates of birth in some passenger records.
“Let me admit that most of it, if not all of it, were just to do with clerical mistakes,” he said.
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Quarshie said the High Commission identified 15 affected records, compared with the 14 initially reported by Accra-based Joy FM.
He explained that the Border Management Authority issues a document known as a “body receipt”, which lists everyone handed over to an airline for repatriation.
The authority deals directly with passengers before they board their flights.
According to him, the High Commission noticed the errors in the document and asked the South African agency to correct them.
“We realised these mistakes, and we wrote to them that they had interchanged expiry date with date of birth,” he said.
However, the High Commission forwarded the records to Ghana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs without amending them because they had been supplied as PDF documents by the South African agency.
He said the records subsequently informed the ministry’s release of the names.
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Quarshie maintained that the errors did not originate at the High Commission, although he acknowledged the concerns they had raised.
“This was not basically an error at our doorstep. It came from the Border Management Authority,” he said.
"Let me admit that most of it, [even all of it] had to do with clerical mistakes" - Ben Quarshie [Ghana's High Commissioner to South Africa] on South Africa evacuation auditing. #Newsfile https://t.co/oHWxRb3ejG
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