Ghana’s Minister for Tourism and Creative Arts, Barbara Oteng Gyasi, has reminded Africans in the diaspora of the choice they have to return to the continent in the wake of racial attacks they are facing abroad. According to her, Ghana, for one, is ready to welcome them home.
Babara Oteng Gyasi was speaking at a ceremony in honour of slain African American, George Floyd organized by the Ministry of Tourism, Ghana Tourism Authority, the Office of Diaspora Affairs at the Office of the President and the Diaspora Africa Forum, in Accra on Friday.
“We continue to open our arms and continue to invite all our brothers and sisters home. Ghana is your home. Africa is your home. We have our arms wide open, ready to welcome you home. Please take advantage. Come home. Build a life in Ghana. You do not have to stay where you are not wanted forever. You have a choice and Africa is waiting for you,” she stated.
The Minister was also hopeful that the death of George Floyd will go a long way in ending prejudice and racial discrimination across the world.
She also demanded that the full force of the law must descend on all other persons who were complicit in the death of George Floyd.
“Racism in America continues to be a deadline pandemic which over 400 years, our brothers and sisters in the United States of America yearned for a cure. George Floyd was not the first black person to use the phrase ‘I can’t breathe’…In 2015, David Dungay, a 26-year-old indigenous Australian cried the same haunting phrase before his tragic death which brought about a lot of tension in Australia but did not change the status quo… The present situation we face today in 2020 with the death of George Floyd is going to result in change…We pray and hope that George Floyd’s death will not be in vain but will bring an end to prejudice and racial discrimination across the world,” she remarked.
The event was also graced by the Omanhene of the Essikado Traditional Area Nana Kobina Nketia.
Elsewhere, hundreds of people filed into a Minneapolis chapel on Thursday to remember George Floyd, the man whose death at the hands of the police opened a nationwide flood of anguish, protest and demands for change in American policing.
By turns somber and defiant, the mourners celebrated Mr. Floyd as a friend and father and uncle to those closest to him, but also as a victim of racial injustice whose killing had drawn a legion of people to the streets.
