Report on Citizenship Law: Ghana 2.1.4 Citizenship Law under the Supreme Military Council (1975 – 1979) and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (Jun 1979 – Sep 1979) After nearly two decades of gradually more hostile immigration politics enshrined in citizenship law, the denationalisation of persons with an immigration background reached its peak from 1978 to 1979. Over the course of these two years, two consecutive military councils simply listed the names of people who, by decree, were to lose their Ghanaian citizenship. The Supreme Military Council (SMC), in 1978 denationalised two citizens, who, judging from their names, had Middle Eastern family backgrounds. The reasons given for denationalising Mohamed Fouad Fattal and Mahmoud Fattal were: ‘serious trade malpractices’, ‘activities constituting economic sabotage and subversion of the economy of Ghana contrary to the public interest’. (Ghana Nationality (Amendment) Decree of 1978). Since Ghana did not allow for dual citizenship at that time, the SMC thereby rendered the two men stateless. In 1979, the Armed Forces Military Council (AFMC) repeated the denationalisation process, this time listing a total of 44 people to denationalise via decree. Again, judging by the names, the people targeted were mainly descendants of Middle Eastern immigrants. This time also, the military council did not even bother to give a reason for the mass denationalisation but simply declared it to be in the public interest (Ghana Nationality (Amendment) Decree of 1979). Ghana was far from the only African country which gradually developed more and more hostile citizenship regulations in the 1960s and 1970s. Confronted with having to form a nationstate within arbitrarily drawn colonial borders, African leaders in other countries also opted for anti-immigration politics that denationalised and disowned ‘non-indigenous’ minorities. Sierra Leone, for instance, marginalised Middle Eastern immigrants and their descendants in a similar way to Ghana, with citizenship laws that required so-called ‘negro African descent’ and restricted non-citizens’ rights to own property (Manby 2018, 164-181). In East Africa, people of South Asian descent had a similar – and in Uganda, a much worse – fate. Similar to the Middle Eastern immigration to West Africa, people from the Indian sub-continent had migrated to Kenya and Uganda during colonial times. Their descendants’ right to citizenship was contested and restricted in both countries. Most egregiously, Idi Amin expelled the entire ‘Asian’ population of Uganda in 1972 (see the case of immigrants’ struggle for citizenship in Sierra Leone and Uganda Manby (2009; 2018, 193-199)). 2.3 The 1979 Constitution and the Abatement of Citizenship Politicisation In Ghana, the politicisation of citizenship subsided in the 1980s. In 1979, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council gave the country a new Constitution before handing over power to a short-lived civilian government, which was toppled just three years later, in 1981. This 1979 Constitution took back some of the harshest citizenship provisions enacted during the previous decade. Most importantly, the descent-based provisions for those born in Ghana after the entry into force of the 1979 constitution were relaxed to require that at least one parent or grandparent was a Ghanaian citizen; while the rule remained that at least one parent must be a Ghanaian citizen for those born outside Ghana (Constitution of 1979, section 13). Moreover, the 1979 Constitution, for the first time, allowed Ghanaian women to confer their citizenship on their spouses, although the provisions for conferring citizenship onto a male spouse still differed from those for female spouses. For women, the 1979 Constitution simply stated that they could apply to be registered as citizens of Ghana if they were married to a Ghanaian citizen and they lost their citizenship upon divorce. Men, however, had to prove that they were in a monogamous relationship and lived in Ghana for a continuous period of at least GLOBALCIT 7