Ghana and South Africa have given clashing accounts of the killing of a Ghanaian man in Cape Town this week, disagreeing over his name, where he died and why.
Ghana’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said on July 1 that a Ghanaian aged 40, named Bashiru Isak, was shot dead in the Khayelitsha area of Cape Town on June 30 during demonstrations against foreign nationals. It condemned the killing as xenophobic and demanded that South Africa arrest and prosecute those responsible.
The South African Police Service (SAPS) rejected that version on Thursday. Provincial police in the Western Cape said the man they are investigating, named as Kwabena Boagen and aged 35, was shot on Monday, June 29, at the Nyanga Terminus, a different part of Cape Town, and that early findings point to extortion rather than xenophobia.
Police also said they had no trace of the incident Ghana described. “The South African Police Service has no record of the alleged murder in Khayelitsha,” the statement said, asking Accra to share details so the case could be checked.
It is not clear whether the two governments are describing the same death or two separate shootings. SAPS said a murder case had been opened in Nyanga and that detectives were working to trace the gunmen, who have not been arrested.
The dispute lands amid renewed unrest in South Africa, where anti migrant groups had set June 30 as a deadline for undocumented migrants to leave. South Africa’s government has publicly condemned the violence. Ghana has evacuated 979 citizens in three batches and, days before the killing, told nationals to avoid protest areas.
Ghana said it had lodged a protest with South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation and that its petition to the African Union over attacks on African nationals remained active. Arrangements were underway to bring the body home.
