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The United Kingdom Home Office has told a retired 74-year-old Ghanaian man, Nelson Shardey who has lived in the UK for 42 years that he is not British.
According to BBC, the Home Office asked him to wait another 10 years before he could stay permanently.
Shardey, from Wallasey in Wirral, had for many years assumed he was officially seen as British, until he discovered otherwise in 2019.
He said he had paid taxes all his adult life, now faces paying thousands of pounds to stay and use the National Health Service (NHS).
The 74-year-old is a retired newsagent who first arrived in the UK in 1977 to study accountancy, on a student visa that also allowed him to work.
He said after a coup in his native Ghana, his family could no longer send him money for the fees.
He took on a series of jobs, making Mother’s Pride bread and Kipling’s Cakes near Southampton, and Bendick’s Chocolate in Winchester, and said no-one ever queried his right to live or work in the UK.
Shardey married a British woman and moved to Wallasey to run his own business, a newsagent called Nelson’s News.
When that marriage ended, he married another British woman and they had two sons Jacob and Aaron.
“I tried my utmost to educate them the best way I could, so that neither of them would depend on social or anything,” Shardey said.
He told his sons to “learn hard, get a good job, and work for themselves”, and both went on to university and then careers as a research scientist and a public relations executive.
Shardey said he had never left the UK, as he saw no need to and regarded it as his home.
“Nobody questioned me. I bought all my things on credit, even the house. I got a mortgage. And nobody questioned me about anything,” he said.
Shardey has performed jury service, and in 2007 was given a police award for bravery after tackling a robber who was attacking a delivery man with a baseball bat.
But in 2019, when he applied for a passport so he could go back to Ghana following the death of his mother, he was told he was not British.
