Ghana's Best Numbers in Years Hide Its Costliest Habit

A seat in Ghana’s Parliament pays a gross salary of about GH¢28,000 a month. Winning one now costs about GH¢10 million.

The second figure comes from the Centre for Democratic Development, presented to the Constitutional Review Committee in April 2025 by its Director of Programmes, Dr Kojo Asante, who put the cost of a parliamentary seat at roughly 650,000 US dollars and the presidency at between 100 and 150 million dollars.

Round it generously and it still takes close to thirty years of gross parliamentary salary to buy a four year job.

So either our politicians are the most self sacrificing philanthropists in West Africa, or the seat is an asset whose expected return clears GH¢10 million. Capital does not flow toward negative net present value. Markets do not lie about this.

Ghana has just posted its strongest macroeconomic figures in a decade. Inflation fell to 4.6 per cent in July 2026, having touched a seven year low of 3.2 per cent in March. Real GDP grew 6 per cent in 2025 and 6.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2026. Public debt fell from 61.8 per cent of GDP at the end of 2024 to 44.7 per cent at the end of 2025. Debt service, which consumed 55.7 per cent of domestic revenue in 2022, took 28.6 per cent in 2025. Government cleared GH¢5.3 billion in legacy arrears without accumulating new ones. Per capita income rose from 2,527 dollars in 2024 to 3,385 dollars in 2025, the highest ever recorded. In July the IMF completed the sixth review of the Extended Credit Facility.

I say all of that as someone who sat through 2022, and I will not diminish it.

But underneath the recovery sits an incentive that no budget statement has ever addressed. In Ghana today, the risk adjusted return on political entrepreneurship still exceeds the risk adjusted return on productive entrepreneurship. Stabilisation is not transformation. What broke us in 2022 was never primarily a debt management error. It was an incentive, and the incentive has not been touched.

THE PRICE OF A SEAT
The trend matters more than the level, and the trend is vertical.

The Westminster Foundation for Democracy and CDD found that the cost of contesting a parliamentary seat rose 59 per cent between 2012 and 2016, reaching an average of about GH¢389,803. Professor Kwasi Prempeh, CDD’s Executive Director, has traced the path since: roughly GH¢124,000 in 2012, about GH¢4 million by 2020, an increase he calculated at 3,125 per cent in eight years. The 2025 estimate is GH¢10 million.

The presidential figures are harder to dispute because they are published by the parties themselves. Average nomination and filing fees alone across the NPP and NDC rose from GH¢72,500 in 2016 to GH¢440,000 in 2024. That is 507 per cent in under a decade, and it is only the entry ticket.

No other asset class in Ghana has repriced like that. Not land in Cantonments. Not treasury bills, which now pay 4.9 per cent on the 91 day tenor. Not gold.

No other asset class in Ghana has repriced like a parliamentary seat. Not land in Cantonments. Not treasury bills. Not gold.

WHAT THE SEAT ACTUALLY PAYS
The return is not the salary. It is the estate that surrounds the office.

Begin with Article 78 of the Constitution, which requires that the majority of ministers be appointed from among members of Parliament. That clause makes a parliamentary seat the gateway to executive power, and therefore to executive discretion. We did not intend to price a seat when we wrote it. We did anyway.

Add the appointment economy of boards, authorities and agencies. Add discretion over procurement. Add the power to decide who is licensed, zoned, cleared, waived or paid, and how quickly.

Then add Article 71. In January 2025 non members were cleared from the chamber so that emoluments for Article 71 officeholders could be considered behind closed doors. Parliament approved the recommendations. Members of the Eighth Parliament have since received ex gratia payments and salary top ups on that basis. The current administration has confirmed, as recently as June 2026, that it has not constituted its own committee and is implementing a structure it inherited.

That is accurate. It is also the point. The 2024 campaign pledge to scrap ex gratia for the executive, with constitutional steps to begin in 2025, remains unfulfilled in August 2026. The President announced in March 2026 that 2026 would be a transition year toward an Independent Emoluments Commission replacing the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission. That body was first recommended by the Constitution Review Commission in 2011 and endorsed in the government White Paper. Fifteen years and four administrations later it does not exist.

The scale of what flows through the discretion is not speculative either. The Auditor General’s report on the public accounts for the year ended December 2025, published this July, put total financial irregularities across ministries, departments and agencies at GH¢5.27 billion. That is the highest figure in five years and more than double the GH¢2.06 billion recorded in 2024, with tax related breaches accounting for more than 91 per cent of it.

The Operation Recover All Loot committee, which received 2,417 complaints, reported in February 2025 that 36 high value cases plus disputed land sales could yield as much as 21.19 billion dollars in recoveries. That figure is a committee estimate rather than an adjudicated sum, and it should be read as such. But even discounted heavily, it describes the size of the prize.

The campaign is the entry fee. The contract is the dividend. The taxpayer is the counterparty on both sides of the trade.

FOUR THINGS EVERYONE IN ACCRA CAN ALREADY SEE

The politician is richer than the manufacturer. A man who has run a metal fabrication shop in Tema for fifteen years and a man who served two terms as a deputy minister do not live in the same neighbourhood. Everyone can see this. Everyone has drawn the obvious conclusion.

The politician outranks the producer socially. At a funeral, the member of Parliament is seated ahead of the chief executive who employs four hundred people. We call the businessman for a donation. We call the politician for a decision. That ordering is not sentimental. It is a public signal about who holds real power over outcomes.

The politician is a celebrity. Each one now has a communications team and a blogger. We have built a media industry around covering the distribution of resources rather than the creation of them. When the news cycle rewards a press conference more than a production line, ambitious young people adjust.

The route to wealth has become legible. Youth unemployment among Ghanaians aged fifteen to thirty five averaged 21.9 per cent through the first three quarters of 2025, and 31.9 per cent in Greater Accra. Nearly two million young people are in no school, no job and no training. Ask any of them how to become wealthy here within a decade and the answer increasingly involves a constituency rather than a company. That is not cynicism. It is arithmetic, and we published it ourselves.

THIS IS ECONOMICS, NOT MORALITY
Colleagues sometimes treat all of the above as a governance concern rather than an economic one. That is a category error, and the literature has been clear about it for thirty five years.

William Baumol argued in 1990 that the supply of entrepreneurial energy in a society is roughly constant. What varies is its allocation between productive activity and unproductive activity such as rent seeking and office holding. The rules of the game decide which channel it flows into. The talent is the same. The destination is different.

Murphy, Shleifer and Vishny put numbers to it a year later in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Where rent seeking rewards talent better than enterprise does, the ablest people choose redistribution over creation and growth slows. Their cross country finding was blunt: economies producing more engineers grew faster, those producing more lawyers grew slower.

Ghana has its own literature. Lindsay Whitfield and colleagues describe our system as competitive clientelism, in which ruling coalitions are so vulnerable to a strong opposition and so internally fragmented that elites can only pursue policies with short time horizons. Her conclusion, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, is the phrase this article is really about: growth without economic transformation.

HOW THIS REACHES THE EXCHANGE RATE
Capital allocates toward proximity rather than productivity. When the highest return investment available is a relationship with a ministry, private capital rationally underweights plant and equipment. The result is our most stubborn statistic. Industry accounted for 31.3 per cent of GDP in 2025 against services at nearly 46 per cent, but manufacturing proper is only about a tenth of the economy, and mining rather than manufacturing has driven the industrial numbers. Seven industrial strategies and three republics have not moved it.

The political business cycle imports macroeconomic instability. Our fiscal blowouts have a rhythm with four beats: election adjacent spending, arrears accumulation, a currency shock, a stabilisation programme, then repeat. Holding a seat requires servicing a constituency. Servicing a constituency requires cash. The pressure to spend is not a moral failing of particular men. It is a structural feature of a system that has priced political survival at GH¢10 million.

The sovereign crowded out the entrepreneur, and has only just stopped. This is where I must report against my own argument, because the news is genuinely good. Real private sector credit contracted for most of 2024. It has since reversed sharply. Credit to the private sector grew 41.2 per cent in the year to June 2026, or 34.1 per cent in real terms, reaching GH¢119.6 billion. The policy rate came down from 28 per cent in mid 2025 to 14 per cent by March 2026, the 91 day bill fell from above 15 per cent to 4.9 per cent, and non performing loans dropped to 16.1 per cent. For the first time in a decade, lending to a Ghanaian business beats lending to the government. That is the single most important number in this article after the GH¢10 million, and my entire concern is whether it survives an election cycle.

Policy discontinuity destroys long horizon investment. Every transition brings a new flagship, a new acronym and a new set of beneficiaries, and dissolves the boards of the last set. If you are weighing whether to sink 20 million dollars into a plant with a twelve year payback, you are not really assessing the market. You are assessing whether the next administration will honour the arrangement. Most conclude, sensibly, that it will not.

The tax burden falls on those who cannot lobby. A narrow base means the compliant formal firm is taxed hard while the connected obtain relief, waivers and delay. The 2026 measures move the right way, removing the COVID levy and lifting the VAT registration threshold from GH¢200,000 to GH¢750,000. But the Auditor General’s finding that over 91 per cent of last year’s GH¢5.27 billion in irregularities was tax related tells you where the leakage still sits, and it is not with the small trader.

BUT CHINA GREW ANYWAY
This is the strongest objection to everything above, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal.

China grew at close to 10 per cent a year for three decades while corruption was enormous. Indonesia under Suharto averaged roughly 7 per cent while political connections were worth, by Raymond Fisman’s estimate, as much as a quarter of a well connected firm’s market value. South Korea and Taiwan industrialised faster than any societies in history while their states handed out cheap credit, licences and protection to favoured firms. Politics was extremely profitable in all four. All four transformed.

So the flat claim that profitable politics prevents progress is false, and anyone who makes it will be corrected in public.

The distinction that survives is about the type of rent, not its size. Yuen Yuen Ang argues in China’s Gilded Age that access money, the exchange of power for profit that is bundled with investment, behaves entirely differently from outright theft. Chinese local officials were promoted on local growth, so their enrichment ran through building things. Alice Amsden and Ha Joon Chang made the parallel point about Korea: the state deliberately created rents, then attached discipline to them. Support was conditional on export performance and withdrawn from firms that failed. Mushtaq Khan generalises it. Every developing capitalism runs on rents. The question is whether the ruling coalition is centralised and patient enough to make those rents conditional on production.

Politics can be profitable and a country can still progress, but only where politics profits from industry rather than instead of it.

That is the sentence Ghana fails. Our rents are conditional on nothing. A contract is not withdrawn because a factory underperformed. A licence is not revoked because nothing was exported.

One caveat I would rather concede than be caught by. Causation runs both ways. A weak industrial base also produces predatory politics, because where there is little private wealth to tax, the state itself becomes the largest prize. Ghana is caught in that loop, not merely at one end of it.

A WARNING, WITH DATES
Vague warnings are how we arrived here, so let me be specific. Three things converge on 2027.

The primaries arrive before the election. The general election falls in December 2028, but the money is raised and spent to secure a nomination, and that begins in 2027. Any reform to campaign finance, procurement or Article 71 not legislated by the end of 2026 will not be legislated at all this cycle, because from 2027 the beneficiaries of the present arrangement will be actively raising money under it.

The debt wall lands in the same year. About GH¢30 billion of restructured domestic debt falls due in February 2027. The Sinking Fund held GH¢15.6 billion at the mid year review with a target of GH¢30 billion by December. If that target is met, the wall is manageable. If it is missed in a year when spending pressure is rising, government returns to the domestic market as a large borrower, yields rise, and the 41 per cent credit growth reverses. Banks will go back to buying treasury bills, as they always have.

The external cushion is narrower than it looks. The 2025 current account surplus of over 8 per cent of GDP rested heavily on gold, with GoldBod generating some 15 billion dollars in foreign exchange earnings at historically high prices. This is a commodity bet wearing the clothes of a policy achievement. Two signals already flash amber: the cedi depreciated 7.9 per cent against the dollar over the first half of 2026, and the IMF has urged the Bank of Ghana to end quasi fiscal operations following losses of some GH¢22 billion on the domestic gold purchase programme.

Investors and analysts should watch five indicators, in this order.

Arrears and payables, not the headline deficit. The clearing of GH¢5.3 billion in legacy arrears without new accumulation is a real achievement. Watch whether it holds through 2027. A primary surplus achieved by not paying contractors is a transfer of the deficit onto the private sector’s balance sheet.

Real private sector credit growth. It stands at 34.1 per cent. If it decelerates sharply while treasury yields rise, crowding out has resumed and the productive economy is again financing the political one.

Energy sector quasi fiscal losses. ECG lost about GH¢32 for every GH¢100 spent procuring electricity in 2024, the worst ratio since 2000. Tariff decisions in an election run up are political decisions, and the collection ratio predicts next year’s fiscal outturn better than most macro variables.

Single source and restricted tender awards as a share of procurement value. The cleanest available proxy for the rent channel. If it rises through 2027, price it.

Manufacturing value added, not industry. Industry at 31.3 per cent of GDP flatters us because it carries gold. Manufacturing is the only number that tells you whether anything has actually changed.

WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY CHANGE IT
None of the remedies are complicated. All are politically expensive, which is why they remain undone. Note what is not on this list: eliminating rents altogether. That is neither achievable nor, in a fragile state, obviously desirable. The goal is to make them conditional.

Legislate campaign finance in this session. Disclosure thresholds, contribution caps, published audited party accounts, electronic and therefore traceable transactions, and criminal liability for false filing. CDD has recommended amending the Political Parties Act to prohibit illicit funding and to establish an office to enforce it. The Constitutional Review process now underway is the opening, and it closes in 2027.

Attach discipline to every cedi of state support. Publish the output, export or employment target attached to each incentive, tax holiday and concessional facility, and publish annually which recipients met it and which lost the support. This is the most important item on the list and the one Korea actually did.

Stand up the Independent Emoluments Commission and give it open sessions. It has been recommended since 2011 and promised again for 2026. Publish a fixed indexed schedule, replace end of term lump sums with a contributory pension on the same terms as the rest of the public service, and let it sit in public. The aim is not austerity. It is to make the office worth exactly what it says on the paper.

Shrink the appointment economy. A statutory cap on ministers and deputies. Consolidation of boards and agencies. Every board seat that exists as a reward rather than a function is a line item in the expected return on that GH¢10 million.

Open up procurement. Publish beneficial ownership of every government counterparty, cap single sourcing at a hard statutory percentage, and move to full electronic procurement with contract level disclosure.

Pay the private sector on time, in statute. A 60 day payment obligation carrying automatic interest would be worth more to Ghanaian small and medium firms than any stimulus we have announced. The arrears clearance shows it can be done. Legislating it means it survives the next transition.

Protect the competent agencies from the electoral cycle. Fixed terms for the technical leadership of the revenue authority, the central bank, the procurement authority and the statistical service, insulated from transition sweeps. Institutional memory is a productive asset. We destroy ours every eight years.

THE LAST WORD
I sit inside this system. I am not writing as an outsider throwing stones at a house I do not live in, and I do not exempt my own side of the aisle. The pattern described here is bipartisan, structural, and older than any government now serving.

We hold something we have not held in years: single digit inflation, debt below 45 per cent of GDP, credit finally flowing to businesses rather than to the Treasury, and, for a short while longer, no election. That is the whole window. It closes in 2027, when the primaries and the debt wall arrive together.

So return to the two numbers at the top. About GH¢28,000 a month. About GH¢10 million to get there.

Until that gap closes, every industrial policy we announce is being written against a price signal pointing the other way. A country becomes what it rewards, and we have been remarkably consistent about what we reward.

SOURCES
CDD Ghana presentation to the Constitutional Review Committee, April 2025 (Dr Kojo Asante). Westminster Foundation for Democracy and CDD Ghana, The Cost of Politics in Ghana (2018). Prof. H. K. Prempeh, Daily Graphic interview on rising election costs. Ghana 2026 Mid Year Budget Review, Ministry of Finance, 23 July 2026. IMF, Sixth Review of Ghana’s ECF Arrangement and 2026 Article IV Consultation, July 2026. Bank of Ghana Monetary Policy Committee releases and Governor’s address to bank CEOs, 12 August 2026. Ghana Statistical Service: annual and quarterly GDP, Quarterly Labour Force Survey 2025, World Population Day release, 28 July 2026. Auditor General’s Report on the Public Accounts of Ghana (MDAs) for the year ended 31 December 2025. Report of the Operation Recover All Loot preparatory committee, February 2025. JoyNews Research on ECG procurement losses. W. J. Baumol, Journal of Political Economy (1990). Murphy, Shleifer and Vishny, Quarterly Journal of Economics (1991). L. Whitfield et al., The Politics of African Industrial Policy (Cambridge, 2015). Y. Y. Ang, China’s Gilded Age (Cambridge, 2020). R. Fisman, American Economic Review (2001). M. Khan, Political Settlements and the Governance of Growth Enhancing Institutions (2010). A. Amsden, Asia’s Next Giant (1989); H. J. Chang (1994).

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