This is a very quick note to explain my recent tweet about the biometric e-gate solution recently commissioned by Ghana’s Vice President (Veep).

Ghana’s current electronic immigration management system is largely funded by the United States and supported by US contractors.

However, it is not true that the system is “controlled” by the US or that all the data is managed by the US. The existing arrangement provides for all the data to be managed by Ghana. The Ghanaian immigration authorities have in fact deployed on-premise servers to handle their own data. There is also a plan for support to be transitioned to the Ghanaian side. Only pure indolence and neglect have stalled this to date.

The US involvement has, however, created the perfect pretext for politically connected entrepreneurs and their politician-enablers to cook up all manner of schemes purportedly to restore Ghana’s sovereignty in immigration matters.

Eventually, the decision was taken to include the modernisation of the electronic immigration system (e-immigration) in the long-term World Bank program to digitalise Ghana dating from 2006, known as e-Ghana. e-Ghana was succeeded, and enhanced, by the e-Transform program, which commenced in 2014.

The e-Immigration component of e-Transform included both software for immigration, border, and visa management, and hardware for biometric e-gates.

e-Immigration is a subset of a broader trend towards the digitalisation of movement across borders.

But before Ghana’s e-Immigration program could fully take off, there was a change of government. Typical in Ghana, this led to some confusion about continuity. Nonetheless, significant amounts of money had been disbursed by 2019.

Here is how the World Bank, writing in April 2020, described progress:

Essentially, $16 million had been spent on a secure immigration system and e-gates by 2019, however an additional $2.9 million was said to be required to reposition the e-Gates in Terminal 3 of the international airport by 2020. The government of Ghana itself made financial allocations to the project that it has so far failed to fully disclose.

Thales, the French IT giant, was hired and paid some of this money to integrate these components into a single, seamless, system. The corporation claims that it did its work and completed handover formalities in 2020.

At any rate, this is how Thales, also writing in 2020, described its delivery:

Imagine, then, my surprise when during my investigations over the last two years at Ghana’s international airport and inside Ghana’s national security, I discovered that none of these systems are in fact operational. NONE!

I decided to probe.

I found, to my complete befuddlement, that notwithstanding all this project design activity, contracting, millions of dollars spent, delivery, etc., politically connected and favoured contractors had continued to push the government to “privatise the intervention” and find ways to insert them into the project to pave way for millions of dollars of fees.

In other essays, I have framed this situation as part of a political economy context in which World Bank and other donor projects constantly fail to deliver due to fundamental governance challenges.

Sometime in 2023, the Vice President’s office became the center of gravity of all these machinations. Our deeply embedded sources there gave us detailed rundowns of machinations to undermine the smooth rollout of the official e-Immigration program, shelf it, and re-award contracts to the most beloved of digital contractors today, the Margins Group. The same fast-growing entity in charge of Ghana’s privatised national identification system.

Here is the breakdown of the project design finally signed off in the Veep’s office:

Let me break it down for you, dear reader. Essentially, Margins Group enlisted the Veep’s powerbase to undermine attempts by another politically connected contractor, Securiport, to deploy an e-Immigration solution offering exactly the same features that have already been paid for, twice, by the World Bank and marked as successfully deployed.

A project that was said to have been fully and effectively funded with ~$20 million of World Bank money was now packaged as a $240 million undertaking necessitating the imposition of additional tax of $11 on air travellers to and from Ghana.

When the immigration authorities balked at the political implications of such a tax, the Veep’s office broached the prospect of the money being creamed off the current revenue generated by Ghana Airport Company and the Ghana Immigration Services.

In the words of one of our sources embedded deep in the security services, “this was outrageous!” Not only was it going to drain the immigration and related departments of resources, it amounted to a wholesale privatisation of Ghana’s national security system.

In short, all the spectacle that was deployed at the airport yesterday in the name of launching a biometric e-gate was simply to protect a $240 million deal for the Margins Group.

With time having run out for a parliamentary approval of the deal, these “state enchantment” tactics are meant to prevent any problems of future continuity by ensuring that all the relevant contracting is rammed through before this administration leaves office.

[This is a developing story.]

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The author, Bright Simons, the Vice President of policy think-tank, IMANI Africa.