Who Can Speak “Ghanaian”?

In the shifting sands of the United Progressive Party’s caretaker politics in the north, truth has become optional and fairy tales have been given institutional shelter.

At the centre of this latest political fiction is a claim so careless it borders on reckless. The suggestion that Ghanaian medical professionals would somehow be linguistically unfit to serve in Antigua and Barbuda because we “cannot speak Ghanaian.”

Let us be clear.

There is no language called “Ghanaian.”

Ghana, like Antigua and Barbuda, is a former British colony. English is its official language. It is the language of government, medicine, law, and education. Ghanaian doctors and nurses are trained, licensed, and examined in English. They write patient notes in English. They study medical textbooks in English. They communicate in English in operating theatres, wards, and emergency rooms.

When a political caretaker raises “who can speak Ghanaian” as a barrier to healthcare recruitment, it exposes a troubling lack of basic knowledge. This is not obscure information. This is fundamental.

And the consequences are not small.

Antigua and Barbuda, like much of the Caribbean, is facing a chronic shortage of healthcare workers. Hospitals are stretched. Nurses are exhausted. Recruitment is a regional and global competition. Every serious government in the region is searching for qualified professionals wherever they can be found.

That is the reality.

Instead, the public was offered a cultural distraction. A suggestion that Ghanaian professionals would somehow be unable to communicate, to integrate, or to serve.

It was not only wrong. It was embarrassing.

And it raises uncomfortable questions. Was it simple ignorance? Was it reckless indifference to fact? Or was it something darker, a reflexive fear of the “other” dressed up as concern?

Because context matters.

As Black people in this region, we have connections to Ghana that are not abstract. They are historical, cultural, and living. Many of the Africans enslaved in Antigua were taken from the West Coast of Africa, including areas that are now modern Ghana. Our Warri originates there, as does our call and answer storytelling traditions.

And beyond history, Antigua and Barbuda has had a vibrant, hardworking Ghanaian community contributing to this country for decades in business, education, and community life.

How does one not know this? How does one speak so confidently, and so wrongly?

At some point, ignorance stops being accidental and starts becoming a choice. And when it is paired with suspicion of outsiders, it begins to look less like confusion and more like cultural amnesia and intentional disinformation.

And disinformation is never neutral.

It poisons public debate. It frightens people. It distracts from what actually matters: improving healthcare delivery for Antiguan and Barbudan patients.

Ghana and Antigua are bound by shared colonial history, shared legal systems, shared educational frameworks, and the same global medical standards. Their healthcare workers sit the same exams, follow the same clinical protocols, and speak the same professional language: English.

So let us call this what it is. Not a principled concern for healthcare quality, but a political hit built on a falsehood.

When lies are allowed to set the tone for national conversations, they do not stay small. They spread. They harden. They corrode institutions from within.

You do not light a house on fire and claim you were just checking the wiring.

If the Opposition wants to debate healthcare policy, staffing levels, or immigration standards, that is fair game. But the foundation of that debate must be truth, not fairy tales, invented languages. Or rhetoric that treats the public as uninformed.

Antigua and Barbuda deserves better than politics by pantomime. And our patients deserve better than politicians who play games with the truth.

Looking forward, one would hope for at least a semblance of responsibility from the Opposition, and perhaps even from the good woman herself, to admit that the excitement of the moment produced an unfortunate, almost comical error.

There is no shame in correcting oneself. There is only danger in refusing to.

To allow such a statement to hang in the public air, unacknowledged and uncorrected, is not a posture that sits comfortably with the slogan “ready to govern.” Leadership is not measured by how loudly one speaks in the heat of a moment, but by how quickly one restores truth when the moment passes.

A party seeking national trust cannot afford to leave basic inaccuracies standing as if they were policy. Not on healthcare, foreign affairs, or culture. Not on something as elementary as what language another country speaks.