You can tell a people’s character from the way they eat jellybeans, an English proverb has said. Well, Ghanaians do not eat a lot of beans, jelly or no jelly. They love their bushmeat and fufu, preferably pounded in a mortar by sweaty men, the beads of sweat adding to the taste of the meal. Where a people do not eat beans, we judge them by the way they treat their animals. There, the average Ghanaian would have a problem. Even inside their own country, Ghanaians are not known to be people who treat their own kindly. Instead, they would extend favours to strangers and watch their kin starve, often with glee. Outside their countries, they are a different breed of anxious, money-grabbing people who would do anything to make ends meets, even when the two ends are diametrically opposed. So saying ‘I do’ when both the bride and the groom actually mean to say ‘I don’t’, is just one of the very normal ways for the Ghanaian immigrant abroad to survive. And you would be surprised: They usually manage to live happily ever after, but often not together. This is what sham marriages are all about.
Recently, a former British immigration official revealed that the British immigration system decidedly turns a blind eye to sham marriages. He contends that officials insist the situation is not ‘all that bad’, preferring to let fraudsters gain permanent residency in Britain through sham marriages than to investigate the thousands of dodgy ‘I dos’ that fake their way through the marriage registry every day. The former immigration official, who is contesting his unfair dismissal from the service, also revealed that most of the sham marriages are contracted by Ghanaians, most of whom pay between £7-10,000 to cheat the system. He is not the first to have made this revelation. Rules were tightened up when immigrants fought against a regulation that required that permission be granted before they could marry. Presently, immigration officials pay numerous surreptitious visits to couples who intend marrying, to ascertain that they are really living as man and wife before their applications are processed. The system’s investigative processes have also been intensified. Many sham marriages have been identified and struck out, but in the end, who can stop two consenting adults from legitimising their relationship through marriage? If Britney Spears could make nonsense of an old institution like marriage, by marrying Jason Alexander in a ‘quicky’ ceremony only to divorce him a fraction of a second, who has the right to prevent a Ghanaian and an Afghan from tying the knot?
What does a sham marriage look like? Perhaps, the problem emanates from the sentence ‘I do’. It is too short and appears incomplete, even though it contains a subject and a lexical verb, making it a grammatically complete sentence. The words do not bounce back to you when it is a sham marriage, especially because most couples who utter them, even in properly constituted legal marriages, sometimes do not mean them. Otherwise, one ‘I do’ should be enough for everybody. Yet, the Madonnas have said it many times. She may say it again to her new toy boy Jesus, if Christ’s second coming does not happen any time soon. In that sense, all subsequent ‘I dos’ are shams of a short. In the end, it is the proclamation ‘I do’ that suffers, because it wears off quickly and loses its semantic appeal, not the people who say it.
‘I do’ may appear easy to say, but the process that eventually takes you to the marriage registry is expensive and laborious. A Canadian immigration newsletter once asked: “How do fake marriage couples meet?” The editor of the newsletter should have asked: How do a male mosquito and the female make love without a condom? And perhaps, he should also have added: Why do they breed more babies when we want the parents out of our bedrooms?” It so happens that word of mouth advertising is traditionally the most reliable way to sell anything. In most Ghanaian circles abroad, two questions are often not asked: The kind of work a person does and his immigration status. These are abominable questions that mar lots of relationships. This is because Ghanaians abroad live in suspicion of each other. The only thing that unites two immigrants is when they learn that they have the same immigration problem. The friendship usually ends when they do what they have to do to sail afloat the immigration waters, where envy and backbiting take over. Once you have money to pay, you would always find a fraudster who is ready to marry you and cheat the system. It is often quite simple: Let’s pretend to be lovers for three months and you benefit from a £10,000 lumpsum for that pretence.
Yet, many immigrants have terrible stories about sham marriages. Sham being sham, these marriages are often contracted by people who are shameless shams themselves. It is common in the USA for an Akata to collect an agreed sum and later threaten to call the cops. They wait until the interview date is due, to issue the threat. Apart from the agreed sum, they would have siphoned other favours from you, including sex. If you were lucky to have done the Lewinsky, then you don’t lose as much if she decided not to go for the final interview. But most Ghanaian marriage fraud connoisseurs advise against any Lewinsky motives, Lewinsky not being a very good girl herself. But the Akata’s are often better, compared with what some Ghanaians have gone through at the hands of their fellow Ghanaians. They charge twice as much and would change addresses after that, knowing that Antoa Nyamaa’s mandate does not extend to sham marriages. The very callous ones would make arrangements with two or three potential sham marriage partners. They gain thrice as much. His three victims lose thrice as much.
For some lucky ones, however, what others pay £10,000 to lose, and end up being deported, comes for free. It is told how an African student politely asked a white colleague in a British university to marry him, so he could avoid being deported after the expiration of his visa. The white girl had told him that she had a boyfriend, whereupon the African student had quickly chipped in: “It doesn’t have to be a legal marriage; we only pretend to be lovers and marry at the registry. We divorce after I have had my papers. You are single again.” The girl asked: ‘That simple? The next day, she was knocking on his door: “Kijo (their version of Kwadwo), let’s go and get married.” Kijo didn’t have to pay a penny. We even understand that he later had a go in there as well, all for free. In effect, Kijo bought nothing and still had two items free.
Still, it is important to ask why a proud national of a democratic country would have to necessarily marry somebody he would not wish to have as an enemy on any average day. That is the question we tried to answer the other day regarding ‘British’ star nurse Charlotte Larbi. It is the same question an American lady wrote to ask me when I lived in England. She had asked: “Mr journalist, I want to know why somebody would leave their country to a foreign country and decide never to go back to where they came from?” She had been born in America and had never wished she would live anywhere else. Recently, she wrote again to ask why I had crossed continents to Canada, when she thought I should be going back to my country of birth to help in its development, so that it would be as good as the rich countries I have been flip-flopping between. But she had also done well to add: “Is it because of the money?”
Well, here in Canada, a white journalist I bumped into in Toronto had also expressed a similar sentiment. But he was forthcoming with an answer: That educated immigrants are better off in their countries than they would ever be abroad. Well, at a point, there isn’t much of a difference between the educated immigrant and the stark illiterate. Presently, many Ghanaians who immigrated to Canada on the Highly Skilled Migrant programme are bitter testimonies unto themselves, having to start the terrible JJC life all over again. Even if they had migrated with PhD degrees from a western country, they necessarily need to get some education from a Canadian university, to be competitive on the job market. Canadian citizenship? What is that? It is not enough compensation in the end. Life abroad is such that sometimes legal immigration is as frustrating as the dreaded-illegal-cash-under-the-table existence. And often the illegals gain, because they would do anything to work the hours, while the celebrated citizens work to pay off car loans and mortgages that do not in the end bring us any good equity.
While we would not succeed in answering the American woman’s question, we would watch carefully how we conduct ourselves. When you hear of crimes involving Ghanaians abroad, you would think the country has a population of 150 Million or more, with 419 training academies scattered all over its ten regions. From identity fraud to exportation of illegal drugs, there is usually a noticeable footprint of a Ghanaian or somebody with a Ghanaian identity. A Ghanaian member of parliament is still languishing in a US jail for trading in heroin. Sons of very, very prominent Ghanaians are serving time in jails abroad. Lots of Ghanaians in the UK have already been busted for marriage fraud, including Ghanaian lawyers who have mostly been accomplices. Credit card companies are wary of their Ghanaian customers. UAE gold marketing companies are presently turning away from gold exports from Ghana, most of which have turned out to be fake, costing the Muslim country millions of dollars. And oh, we nearly forgot: we have a suicide bomber serving time in a British jail. And we are only 23 Million people.

Benjamin Tawiah is a journalist.
quesiquesi@hotmail.co.uk