While diplomats and locals alike repeat the mantra “Ghanaians and Nigerians are brothers”, in Accra’s major market centres, this bond of regional brotherhood is severely strained.

The Ghanaian capital’s sprawling Abossey Okai spare parts market, where Ghanaian, Nigerian, and other foreign traders operate inches apart, is now in a state of constant tension. Nigerians – the market’s single largest group of foreign retailers – are finding their businesses systematically locked up by frustrated local trade unions.

The friction is part of a historical pattern of retaliatory policy between the two West African nations. While the 1983 ‘Ghana Must Go’ expulsion from Nigeria is famous, the precedent for mass deportation was set by Ghana more than a decade earlier. In 1969, Ghana invoked the Aliens Compliance Order to remove millions of migrants, mostly Nigerians, citing their dominance in the local economy. This was followed in 1979 by state-led ‘house-cleaning’ exercises that targeted the retail class, effectively shifting much of the trade into the informal sector.

Under the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre Act 2013, foreign nationals must meet a $1m minimum equity to trade in Ghana. The law also explicitly bars non-citizens and businesses not wholly owned by citizens from participating in the country’s retail sector.

Yet, Nigerians are continuing to do so – and successive governments have struggled to stop them.

Tempting as it is to see the current tensions simply as a case of ‘uncontrolled migration’ and unenforced laws, Nigerian traders have dominated markets in much of Western Africa since the pre-colonial period.

“In the 1930s, a man’s cover cloth made of kejipa cost around 3/- in Nigeria,” writes the anthropologist J.S Eades in Strangers and Traders: Yoruba Migrants, Markets and the State in Northern Ghana. “This could be sold for 5/- in French territory or for 7/- in Ghana. After 1945 the price rose to 7/- in Nigeria and 15/- or more in Ghana.”

The trading communities and commodities traded across the borders of Ghana and Nigeria have changed, but the deep kinship networks supporting this cross-border continue to move goods, capital, resources and know-how far more efficiently than through official channels.

Ghana’s struggles to protect its local industry in the context of the relatively free movement of goods and people across West Africa will sound familiar to policymakers across the world as they struggle to impose outdated national legal frameworks in a world of globalised trade and transport.

The enforcement gap

In theory, Ghana’s imports and customs regime ought to help Ghanaian traders fight off competition from their peers in the rest of the region by forcing their Nigerian counterparts to rely on a grey market of middlemen who offer their services for a fee. But customs clearing agents, speaking to openDemocracy on the condition of anonymity, said the reality is more complex.

Despite Ghana’s long coastline, some of the Nigerian goods in Ghana’s markets reach the continent through ports in neighbouring Benin and Togo, where import fees are lower and are then hustled across the border, the customs agent said. “Then, when the goods reach Ghana Customs, we, the clearing agents, negotiate on their behalf for a lower amount because we know they cannot pay the full duty.”

Each stage in this complicated journey, academic research indicates, is driven by kinship networks between Nigerian traders dispersed across Ghana, Nigeria, Benin and Togo.

So even though the nationality of a trader in Ghana’s spare parts market should not give them any distinct advantage in the price of their goods, a mixture of taxes, travel routes, and informal negotiations favours Nigerian traders.

This difference makes it nearly impossible for the local industry to make as much money. As Benjamin Takyi Addo, spokesperson for the Abossey Okai dealers, told openDemocracy: “With all these dynamics, there is no way you can compete with the Nigerians.”

As a consequence, Ghanaian traders are urging their government to enforce local laws more rigorously.

As in Ghana’s housing market, where residential landlords often prioritise renting to returning diasporans who can afford higher prices, further pricing out locals, retail landlords prefer to rent their shops to the highest-bidding foreign trader, with many valuing their profits over compliance.

Ghanaian trade leaders say that the laws intended to combat this are rendered ineffective by a combination of domestic complicity and weak state enforcement.

One big issue the authorities face in any crackdown is obtaining accurate data on the number of foreign nationals trading spare parts at the market, says Takyi Addo. Some Nigerians register their businesses in their Ghanaian partners’ names, making it difficult to track who actually owns or manages the shops.

“When interministerial task forces from the National Intelligence Bureau, immigration, military, and customs try to close down shops, they get disappointed because the association does not have the accurate data for the government to carry out its mandate and operations,” Takyi Addo told openDemocracy.