Ghana's Parliament and the Quran Agree: Knowing the True Cost of Things Is Where Accountability Begins

Finance Minister Ato Forson's Value for Money Bill lands in Parliament the same week Ramadan opens with a verse about naming. The timing, it turns out, is instructive.

Quranic Foundation:
“And He taught Adam the names of all things.”
(Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:31)

The second verse of this Ramadan series carries a lesson that Parliament heard again on Tuesday, though perhaps without recognising its ancient source. Allah, before testing Adam, gave him something more foundational than strength or authority. He gave him the capacity to name all things. Every category, every classification, every accurate label for the world as it actually stands. Fourteen centuries of governance theory has since arrived at the same conclusion through harder routes: a society that cannot name its problems with precision cannot fix them.

Finance Minister Dr Cassiel Ato Forson laid the Value for Money Office Bill before Parliament, describing it as a decisive response to Ghana's long-running failure of public financial management. The diagnosis embedded in the Bill is forensic. Inflated contracts. Abandoned infrastructure. Serial cost overruns. Wasteful expenditure. They represent a trillion cedi accumulation of Ghana naming its own spending without the discipline to know what that spending is actually worth. The proposed Value for Money Office will assess government contracts before award, issue mandatory certificates of genuine cost, monitor delivery, and enforce sanctions. A real-time public transparency portal is also planned, giving citizens direct access to cost benchmarks and project outcomes.

The Quranic resonance runs deeper than coincidence. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that the limits of our language are the limits of our world: what a society refuses to articulate with precision, it cannot think through clearly. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman's work on cognitive bias demonstrated that institutions, precisely like individuals, systematically overestimate value and underestimate cost when accountability structures are absent. The Value for Money Office, stripped of its legislative language, is an institutional answer to this human tendency: a mechanism that forces accurate naming before public money moves.

For Ghana's national development, the stakes are direct. Every overpriced road contract, every abandoned school block, every inflated procurement deal represents knowledge suppressed at the point of decision. A government that knows the true name of a project's cost, and acts on that knowledge, builds infrastructure that lasts. One that does not produce the catalogue of failure that Dr Ato Forson placed before Parliament as exhibit A. The Adamic capacity for naming is, in governance terms, the capacity for honest accounting.

The global cost of refusing to name things accurately carries its starkest contemporary witness in Gaza. Since a ceasefire took effect in October 2025, Israel has violated the agreement at least 1,620 times, killing over 615 Palestinians during a period formally designated as peace. The confirmed death toll since October 2023 now exceeds 75,000, the majority of them women and children. Amnesty International and B'Tselem have both named what the evidence compels: genocide continuing under ceasefire cover. The international community, in possession of the same facts, has chosen calibrated language over honest naming. The Quran understood this failure long before international law codified it: the withholding of an accurate name is its own form of complicity.

As Ramadan progresses, this series will draw on further Quranic verses to show how faith, properly understood, has always offered the most rigorous standard for human accountability. Today's lesson, from Adam's naming to Parliament's Value for Money Bill, is consistent across millennia. Know the true cost. Name things accurately. Build from that honest foundation. Faith, in this reading, is not a retreat from the world's difficulties. It is the oldest available argument for facing them clearly.

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