2023/12/19 by Garba, Faisal
paper · doi:10.57832/e5w1-8965
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria, and 44 years since the earlier expulsion of Nigerians from Ghana. Ideas and practices of exclusion based on citizenship and nationality have become tools by which States in Africa sometimes manage populations and socio-economic crises. States in the West African sub-region have mostly inherited these tools from the colonial assignment of belonging and have since gone on to apply them on whatever population appears vulnerable. This practice came to a peak in 1983 when an economic crisis in Nigeria was blamed on immigrants, the majority of whom were from Ghana.