Ghana: The First to Go Free
And the first to find out what that meant, including for its neighbours.
Ghana-Net.com · History & Empires · Ghana and Nigeria · 1969 and 1983
In November 1969 Ghana gave foreigners without papers two weeks to regularise or leave, and well over a hundred thousand Nigerians packed up and went. Thirteen years later Nigeria did the same to Ghanaians, on a far bigger scale, and a cheap plaid bag got a name that the whole of West Africa still uses. Most Ghanaian sites tell only the second story. Most Nigerian sites tell only the first. Here are both, because neither makes sense without the other.
In the colonial Gold Coast and the Ghana of the 1960s, West Africans moved where the work was. The cocoa farms of Ashanti and the east, the gold mines of Obuasi and Tarkwa and the markets of Accra, Kumasi and the zongos of every large town drew migrants from Upper Volta (today's Burkina Faso), Togo, Niger, Mali and above all Nigeria. Yoruba traders ran a large share of retail and market trade, and many families had been in Ghana for two or three generations.
Nkrumah's pan-Africanism made that easy to live with. But after the 1966 coup, with debt, unemployment and falling cocoa prices, the mood changed. Foreign traders became an easy explanation for empty pockets.
The civilian government of Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia, in office for barely two months, announced that all aliens without valid residence permits had two weeks to obtain them or leave the country. Legally it rested on existing immigration law; politically it was presented as a way to free jobs and trade for Ghanaians.
The follow-up: in 1970 the Ghanaian Business Promotion Act reserved small-scale retail trade and several other sectors for Ghanaians. The Order moved people out; the Act closed the market stalls behind them.
Figures vary with the source. A widely used estimate is that about 140,000 of some 190,000 Nigerians in Ghana left, and that close to 200,000 aliens in total were affected, among them people from Togo, Upper Volta, Niger, Côte d'Ivoire and Mali. Many had never lived anywhere else. Families sold property at a fraction of its value, crowded lorries headed for the Togo border, and markets in Accra and Kumasi lost traders overnight.
In Ghana the Order was popular at the time. In Nigeria, then in the middle of the Biafran war, it was remembered as a humiliation, and it was not forgotten.
Nigeria's oil boom of the 1970s turned the flow around. As Ghana's economy fell apart under Acheampong's military government, kalabule (profiteering), shortages and inflation, hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians went east: teachers, nurses, labourers, drivers, traders, many without papers. By the early 1980s Nigeria was the place a young Ghanaian went to make money. Then the oil price fell, and Nigeria had its own unemployment and an election coming.
President Shehu Shagari's government ordered all illegal immigrants to leave Nigeria within about two weeks. Roughly two million West Africans were affected; around half, commonly given as 900,000 to 1.2 million, were Ghanaians. That was close to one in ten of Ghana's population at the time.
Nigerian memory: many Nigerians still describe 1983 as a delayed reply to 1969. Officially it was about jobs and crime, as 1969 had been. The two orders read almost alike.
The timing could hardly have been worse. The returnees arrived in the middle of the drought and bushfires that made 1983 Ghana's hungriest year. A million extra mouths came home to villages that were already short of food. Yet the feared collapse did not happen: families absorbed their own, many returnees went back to farming, and some historians credit the extra labour with helping the harvests recover in 1984.
Two years later, in 1985, Nigeria ordered a second, smaller expulsion. Ghanaians were again among those who had to leave.
The cheap woven plastic holdall in red, blue or checked plaid, the bag that could carry a whole life, was what most returnees packed. In Nigeria it has been called the "Ghana Must Go" bag ever since. It became a symbol well beyond migration: in Nigerian politics, "Ghana Must Go" bags stuffed with cash are shorthand for bribery.
An uncomfortable fact: a Ghanaian's worst memory became a Nigerian household word, and a Nigerian's worst memory of 1969 has no catchy name at all. That imbalance says a lot about which country tells its stories louder.
Both expulsions sit awkwardly beside the idea of West African unity. ECOWAS, founded in 1975 with a protocol on free movement, did not stop the 1983 order. The argument came back in 2019 and 2020, when Ghanaian authorities and traders' groups closed shops run by Nigerians under the rules reserving retail trade for Ghanaians, and newspapers in both countries reached straight for 1969 and 1983.
And the first to find out what that meant, including for its neighbours.
Busia in 1969, Rawlings in 1983: every head of state since 1957.
Another chapter of Ghana's troubled borders.
Where the question "who is allowed to trade?" is still argued every day.
1969 and 1983 are the same story told from opposite ends. Both governments blamed foreigners for an economy they could not fix, both gave people two weeks, and both left families to lose homes and businesses built over decades. Ghana cannot fairly remember 1983 as a Nigerian cruelty while forgetting that it did the same first. Nigeria cannot fairly remember 1969 while laughing about the bag. The lesson for both is the one Nkrumah preached in 1957 and neither country practised: a West African in another West African country is not an alien.
Verified: 28 September 2026. The Order's date (18 November 1969) and two-week deadline, the estimate of about 140,000 Nigerians expelled, the 1970 Business Promotion Act, the Nigerian order of 17 January 1983 and the estimate of 0.9–1.2 million Ghanaian returnees follow published histories (including the Edward A. Ulzen Memorial Foundation and standard references). All numbers are estimates and differ by source. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.