Canadian visa applicants choke Abelenkpe neighbourhood
Some residents of Abelenkpe in the Ayawaso West Municipal Assembly of the Greater Accra Region are unhappy with the vehicular and human congestion caused by the large crowd of Canadian visa applicants in their community.
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A visit by the Daily Graphic to the community saw a lot of people at the Baptist Convention Building, which hosts the visa application centre waiting in queues for their biometric data to be captured for a Canadian visa.
The centre regularly experiences long queues with individuals and their families waiting outdoors for their turn.
The centre has no parking space, and sanitation and toilet facilities for waiting applicants are non-existent which residents describe as an environmental hazard.
Weather
Again, the waiting area outside the biometric capturing centre has no seating area or a makeshift facility to provide shelter, leaving the teeming applicants at the mercy of the vagaries of the weather.
Spokesperson for the residents, Leonora Agyarko-Kyeremanten described the situation as a nuisance that required immediate attention.
“This state of affairs will not be permitted in Canada. Both Ghana and Canada are signatories to the Kyoto Protocols on Climate Change which is essentially caused by environmental hazard”, she said.
Garbage
“By the time they are done with their processes, they leave leaps of garbage for us every day”.
“Our community has become unsuitable for the purpose for which some residents chose this area to enjoy our retirement”, she said.
However, the Senior Resource Management Officer at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which hosts the Canadian visa application centre, David Shokry, attributed the congestion at the visa application centre to applicants showing up early with their families and friends.
He said the security personnel would not grant them access and would insist that they wait for their time to be granted entry into the application centre.
Mr Shokry said the IOM had acquired a new facility in Accra that was more spacious to comfortably host the teeming visa applicants.
