Gov’t is poised to resolve GIS challenges - Mr Ahwoi

Kwesi Ahwoi, Minister for the Interior, on Monday said government was well-informed about the challenges facing the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) and was poised to resolve them.

The problems include logistics, office and residential accommodation.

“We are poised to finding all reasonable and realistic means of solving these myriad of challenges so that you would continuously avail yourselves when duty demands,” Mr Ahwoi said on Monday when he paid an official visit to the GIS Headquarters in Accra.

The visit coincided with the presentation of ICT equipment worth GH¢363,000 to the GIS and the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Ghana Police Service by the European Union.

The donation, which fell under the European Union Fund Project for ‘Countering Human Smuggling and Other Irregular Migration in Ghana”, was to facilitate work at the Thematic Programmes on Migration and Asylum aimed at disrupting organised irregular migration activities through capacity building of GIS and its partner agencies.

He said as far as the GIS was concerned efforts were far advanced to resolve the many challenges faced by the Border Patrol Unit and other key units to help enhance their operational efficiency.

Mr Ahwoi said government was aware of the recent successes chalked by the Service in terms of joint rescue operations of trafficked children and the interception of human smuggling activities and efforts at curbing money laundering, Cyber fraud and other forms of crimes usually associated with the phenomenon of human trafficking and smuggling.

He, therefore, commended the GIS for the good work done so far and encouraged the staff to push the frontiers of their operational activities to higher levels of effectiveness and efficiency.

Dr Peter A. Wiredu, Acting Director of GIS said, regardless of the myriad of challenges the Service faced and the daunting tasks of meeting its organizational aspirations, they were on the edge to succeed.

“It is therefore with such determination that we have worked and continue to work tirelessly towards ensuring the successful implementation of the programme,” he said.

He said one significant area in which the programme had chalked yet another feat was that of inter-agency collaboration and the programme believed that a better informed public would travel only through safe means since the movements of people across territorial boundaries and frontiers could never be halted by a mere wishful thinking.

“As a result, the Migration Information Bureau of the GIS has been upgraded and reasonably resourced to perform its mandate”, he added.

The Head of EU delegation to Ghana, Mr Judikael Regnaut, said the EU and its member states were aiming to build the capacity of the GIS and its partner agencies to use information gathering and intelligence knowledge and skills, coupled with the increased expertise of its officers, to effectively tackle the criminal network behind organised irregular migration.

He said so far, global efforts to curb the growing tide of smuggled individuals had been largely focused on the apprehension and deportation of individual migrants and little had been done in a way of dismantling the organisations behind the business of people smuggling.