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Former Ghana High Commissioner to South Africa and current Member of Parliament for Abirem, Hon. Charles Owiredu, has strongly refuted claims made by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, regarding prolonged delays in the processing of Ghanaian visa applications.
In a sharply worded statement issued Wednesday, May 21, Hon. Owiredu described Ablakwa’s assertion that visa processing times had taken as long as six weeks as “false” and “misleading”.
“Honourable Foreign Minister, please get your facts right,” Owiredu wrote. “It is never true that it took up to 6 weeks to process Ghana visa applications. It has always been between 2 and 5 days.”
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The statement was in reaction to a new visa policy introduced by the Foreign Ministry earlier in the day. Announced via a Facebook post by Mr. Ablakwa, the policy mandates that all visa applications to Ghana be processed within five working days, a move the minister said would eliminate “the troubling average of four to six weeks” in delays.
But Hon. Owiredu insists that the so-called delay never existed — at least not on the scale claimed.
“The exception will be when the application is incomplete; even with that, the process never took six weeks to complete,” he argued. “Under President Akufo-Addo, we even encouraged visa on arrival for the ‘Year of Return’ and ‘Detty December’ revellers.”
He challenged the minister to consult the official websites of various Ghanaian diplomatic missions to verify the actual visa processing timelines.
“Kindly check the websites of our embassies in Japan, Belgium, Italy, China, and France, among others. They all have 2–5 days as the duration for the processing and issuance of Ghana visas,” he noted.
The Abirem MP acknowledged that embassies in the USA, UK, and Germany may have experienced extended timelines but emphasised that these were “outliers” among Ghana’s 60-plus missions worldwide. Even in those cases, he said, six-week processing was never the norm.
“For ease of reference, I have attached the processing days of some of our embassies. Get to work, Hon. Foreign Minister. Enough of the propaganda,” Owiredu concluded.
The new visa directive by the Foreign Ministry is part of a broader effort by the Mahama administration to position Ghana as an open, business-friendly destination. Mr. Ablakwa tied the new measures to President John Mahama’s inaugural pledge that “Ghana is open for business.”
“We have put in place adequate measures at our diplomatic missions to drastically cut down the visa processing time… to our new five-day directive,” Ablakwa stated.
He added that the shortened processing time does not mean automatic visa approval, but rather a quicker decision — either approval or denial — for applicants.
“As foreign minister, I want to make Ghana a more attractive destination for investors and tourists by removing bureaucratic hurdles that have discouraged many over the years,” he wrote.
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