Report on Citizenship Law: Ghana general election will unfold and whether Ghana’s constitution and citizenship act will be amended to allow dual citizens to hold public offices, the developments since 1996 make clear that Ghana has, since the introduction of dual citizenship, been on a political course that leads to further liberalisation rather than to restricting dual citizen’s rights. Dual citizenship is not the only citizenship-related issue that has marked the election campaign. Voter registration, as already in the previous 2020 election, has again been a divisive issue. In the run-up to the 2020 general elections, the Electoral Commission of Ghana decided to no longer accept birth certificates and voter identification cards as proof of voter registration. Still accepted proofs of citizenship in the new voter registration in 2020 were passports, identity cards, and, for those who do not have either of the two, guarantors (a process by which citizens who possess identity documentation vouch for the citizenship of an undocumented citizen). The oppositional NDC took legal action against this procedure before the Ghanaian Supreme Court but lost their case (NDC vs Attorney General 2021). For the upcoming elections in 2024, the Electoral Commission has now pushed the issue even further by proposing that identity cards alone should be the sole acceptable documents for voter registration, however, so far without success (Agyeman 2024; GhanaWeb 2024). Besides the undemocratic character of such exclusion of identity documents from voter registration, the issue has laid bare a major issue: the country’s high levels of undocumentedness. Many Ghanaians still do not possess an ID, let alone a passport, particularly those from poor and rural backgrounds (Akapule 2020). It is still a reality in Ghana that children born into poverty often are not registered at birth because their parents lack access to administration and documentation. Such undocumented persons can end up living a life of statelessness without ever having left Ghana. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), on average only 63% of children born in Ghana received a birth certificate in 2013, and the figures are even worse for those born in rural Ghana (UNICEF 2013, 41; see also: Atuguba, Tuokuu, and Gbang 2020). Because of this reality, Ghana's Citizenship Act provides that where there is doubt as to the citizenship by birth of a person, the Minister of Home Affairs may ‘certify that the person is a citizen of Ghana’ (Citizenship Act, No.591 of 2000, section 14(3)). The usage of this provision is, however, ‘effectively unknown in practice’ (Manby 2018, 126-127). Moreover, some minorities reported difficulties when trying to access IDs. This is particularly true for Ghanaians who identify as ethnically Fulani. Since Fulani traditionally live(d) nomadically across the Sahel region, they are still often perceived as strangers. Many Fulani have complained about being wrongfully denied their citizenship by local administrators (GhanaWeb 2023; StarrFM 2020). 5. Conclusions Ghana has long left behind its past of using citizenship law as a means to denationalise parts of its ‘immigrant’ population. Dorman, Hammett, and Nugent (2007) famously called the early period after the independences in Africa a period of ‘making nations [and] creating strangers’ – and this phrase chimes well with what happened in Ghana in the 1960s and 1970s. With borders arbitrarily drawn by the colonialists, Ghana’s early governments were thrown into leading a country that lumped together dozens of different languages and, at its borders, divided communities into different state memberships. In such a situation the question of who we are and who belongs forced itself onto the Ghanaian society. Sadly, it is in this situation as well that, with political instability and economic decline, purported strangers were scapegoated for the country’s malaises. Rhetoric was followed by legislation that denationalised, expropriated and deported people of other (West) African and Middle Eastern descent. The politicisation of citizenship law, however, abated at the end of 1979. After nearly two decades GLOBALCIT 17