Ghana will relocate the statue of Mahatma Gandhi, an Indian independence leader from the University of Ghana due to the late civil rights leader’s past controversial links to racism.

Professors and students at the university launched a petition to remove Gandhi’s statute last month, just three months after Indian President, Pranab Mukherjee inaugurated it as a symbol of unity between the two nations.

”The government would therefore want to relocate the statue from the University of Ghana to ensure its safety and to avoid the controversy…being a distraction from our strong ties of friendship,” Associated Press quoted a statement from the foreign ministry last week.

The decision to relocate the effigy has drawn opposition from the petitioners who said that the statue should be taken back to India instead of relocating it because it will not be well received in other parts of the nation.

The Indian government played down the protests, saying that the two nations had discussed the matter that had also arose in South Africa, where Gandhi spent he lived between 1893 and 1914 campaigning for the rights of Indian descendants working as laborers in Natal province, present-day KwaZulu-Natal, Mail & Guardian Africa reported.

The protesters said that Gandhi degraded blacks despite his strong agitation for civil rights.

The late civil rights leader repeatedly called Africans kaffirs, an ethnic slur used by whites to describe blacks in South Africa during his stay in the nation.

Gandhi during a speech in Mumbai in 1896, said that the Europeans in Natal province wished to ‘degrade Indians to the level of raw kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect  a certain number of cattle to buy wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness,’ The Washington Post reported.

Ghanaian students have used hashtags like #GandhiMustComeDown and #GandhiForComeDown, to rally people on social media against the statue after its inauguration at the university.

The calls to relocate the statue come barely a year after similar protests in South Africa, where university students called for the removal of Cecil Rhodes’ statue.

In both protests, students said that the statues glorify non-blacks who racially abused Africans and denied them equal opportunities.

The calls to relocate Gandhi’s statue is likely to cause a diplomatic spat between India and several African countries where there are anti-Gandhi campaigns, The Hindu reported.