The Director of Diaspora Affairs at the Office of the President, Akwasi Awuah Ababio, has announced that the President, Nana Akufo-Addo will be granting up to 200 African Diasporans Ghanaian citizenship this year.
This said this in an interview with Citi TV after a press briefing on The Year of Return at the Accra Information Tourist Centre on Thursday, November 21, 2019.
“The key thing that we are very much interested in is to make sure that we give that citizenship to them. For those who have applied to our office to be given citizenship, we are going to make sure that about 200 of those people will be given that citizenship,” he said.
He said a ceremony will be held on December 27, 2019, at the Jubilee House where the President Nana Akufo-Addo will exercise his constitutional prerogative to grant about 200 people Ghanaian citizenship.
“For some of them, they have been in the country for so long and they deserve it,” Akwasi Awuah added.
This comes on the back a similar exercise which was executed by Former President John Dramani Mahama in 2016 when he also granted Ghanaian citizenship to 30 African Diasporans.
The Year of Return is an initiative by the government to celebrate 400 years of the slave trade.
The event which started in January as seen a lot of personalities visit the country. Celebrities like Mutabaruka, Deborah Cox, AJ Johnson, Samuel L Jackson, Danny Glover, Steve Harvey have all been in the country.
The celebration hits its crescendo in December where a litany of programmes has been abled for the celebration.
African Diasporans and Ghanaians will enjoy programmes like Decemba 2 Remember, AfroNation, Detty Rave, Kiddafest, Asante Bonwire Kente Festival, Gold Coast experience, among others.
From January this year, events like Fuse ODG’s TINA Festival, African Culture & Wellness Festival, Kwahu Paragliding, Jagafest have been held.
The “Year of Return, Ghana 2019” is a major landmark spiritual and birth-right journey inviting the Global African family, home and abroad, to mark 400 years of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown, Virginia.
The arrival of enslaved Africans marked a sordid and sad period when our kith and kin were forcefully taken away from Africa into years of deprivation, humiliation and torture.
While August 2019 marks 400 years since enslaved Africans arrived in the United States, “The Year of Return, Ghana 2019” celebrates the cumulative resilience of all the victims of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade who were scattered and displaced through the world in North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia.
