Features
Mobile Consular Services for Ghana immigrants in Finland
Ghanaian immigrants in Finland recently benefited once again from a mobile con sular service conducted in Helsinki by the Ghana Embassy in Oslo.
The mobile consular services was organised from January 21to 24, 2023 by the staff of the Ghana Embassy in Oslo.
The team, made up of the Head of the Con sular Section of the Embassy, Nana Antwi Baffour and Mr. Arthur Mills, Counsellor/ Political & Economic Desk, worked tirelessly to serve the over 200 applications presented to them during the exercise.
A similar service was first conducted in Hel sinki in September 2021 by the Embassy where they served over 300 applications for the bio metric passports.
At that time, the huge number of applications could largely be attributed to the COVID-19 situation with its attendant problems such as the lockdowns which prevented people whose passports had expired as well as babies who had been born around that period from travelling or initiating the process to secure new passports.
The recent exercise still saw a huge number of applicants and the team was under immense pressure to serve them all.
The first-ever mobile services took place in Oc tober 2018 when staff from the Ghana Embassy in Denmark, which at that time had concurrent accreditation to Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland, organised the exercise in Helsinki.
The Ghana Embassy in Oslo has continued with the consular services ever since it took over from the Ghana Embassy in Denmark and the accredi tation to Finland and Iceland.
The mobile consular exercise is organised peri odically to bring consular services to the door-step of immigrants Ghanaians in Finland and help them with services such as securing biometric passports which would eventually replace the machine-readable ones. The exercise is hailed as a huge benefit to many people.
Generally, the mobile consular service involves immigration issues such as the issuing of pass ports, visas, authentication, renunciation and dual citizenship, travelling certificates, among others.
The recent exercise, however, mainly concentrated on applications for biometric passports, which seemed to dominate applicants’ concerns.
Many people later gave very positive and high ly appreciative feedback about the exercise, especially because of the time and money saved.
To them, it could have been very costly, inconvenient and difficult if they had had to travel or post their documents to the Ghana Embassy in Oslo, the capital of Norway.
Many of them admired the professional, excellent and very helpful service rendered by the efficient staff in such a commendable way.
They wished that the mobile consular services would be arranged regularly to make things easy for those who want to access the consular services. Thank you.
Email: perpetualcrentsl@yahoo.com
By Perpetual Crentsil
One of the issues we have been grappling with as a nation is corruption, and it has had such a devastating effect on our national development. I have been convinced that until morality becomes the foundation upon which our governance system is built, we can never go forward as a nation.
Our traditional practices, which have shaped our cultural beliefs, have always espoused values that have kept us along the straight and the narrow and have preserved our societies since ancient times.
These are values that frown on negative habits like stealing, cheating, greediness, selfishness, etc. Our grandparents have told us stories of societies where stealing was regarded as so shameful that offenders, when caught, have on a number of instances committed suicide.
In fact, my mother told me of a story where a man who was living in the same village as her mother (my grandmother), after having been caught stealing a neighbour’s cockerel, out of shame committed suicide on a mango tree. Those were the days that shameful acts were an abomination.
Tegare worship, a traditional spiritual worship during which the spirit possesses the Tegare Priest and begins to reveal secrets, was one of the means by which the society upheld African values in the days of my grandmother and the early childhood days of my mother.
Those were the days when the fear of being killed by Tegare prevented people from engaging in anti-social vices. These days, people sleeping with other people’s wives are not uncommon.
These wrongful behaviour was not countenanced at all by Tegare. One was likely going to lose his life on days that Tegare operates, and so unhealthy habits like coveting your neighbour’s wife was a taboo.
Stealing of other people’s farm produce, for instance, could mean certain death or incapacitation of the whole or part of the body in the full glare of everybody. People realised that there were consequences for wrongdoing, and this went a long way to motivate the society to adhere to right values.
Imagine a President being sworn into office and whoever administers the oath says, “Please say this after me: I, Mr. …., do solemnly swear by God, the spirits of my ancestors and the spirits ruling in Ghana, that should I engage in corrupt acts, may I and my family become crippled, may madness become entrenched in my family, may incurable sicknesses and diseases be my portion and that of my family, both immediate and extended.”
Can you imagine a situation where a few weeks afterwards the President goes to engage in corrupt acts and we hear of his sudden demise or incapacitation and confessing that he engaged in corrupt acts before passing or before the incapacitation—and the effect it will have on his successor? I believe we have to critically examine this option to curb corruption.
My grandmother gave me an eyewitness account of one such encounter where a woman died instantly after the Tegare Priest had revealed a wrong attitude she had displayed during the performance on one of the days scheduled for Tegare spirit manifestation.
According to her story, the Priest, after he had been possessed by the spirit, declared that for what the woman had done, he would not forgive her and that he would kill. Instantly, according to my grandmother, the lady fell down suddenly and she died—just like what happened to Ananias and his wife Sapphira in Acts Chapter 5.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO
By Laud Kissi-Mensah
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BY ROBERT EKOW GRIMMOND-THOMPSON
