The Currency of Truth: Reconciling the $1.7 Billion IMF Report, GoldBod, and Ghana’s Economic Reality

The public discourse surrounding Ghana’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP) has rapidly devolved into a hyper-partisan shouting match, leaving the ordinary Ghanaian taxpayer caught in a crossfire of conflicting numbers and aggressive political rhetoric. On one side, the Minority in Parliament, led by Hon. Alexander Kwamena Afenyo-Markin, points to a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) Selected Issues Report detailing massive, multi-billion dollar losses. On the other side, GoldBod and its defenders present audit books boasting historical operational surpluses.

When public financial matters involving billions of dollars are reduced to personal insults and political theater, true accountability is the first casualty. To move forward, we must strip away the political drama and look at how macro-fiscal bookkeeping actually works. From an economic perspective, it is entirely possible for an agency to record a surplus on its independent ledger while the central bank simultaneously bears enormous transaction costs to stabilize the broader economy. Let us dive into the 2025 hard data to reconcile the figures and uncover the truth.

The Bookkeeping Decoupling and 2025 Economic Reality

To cut through the political noise, we must master a foundational concept in public finance: entity-level accounting versus macroeconomic policy accounting. When we examine the fiscal year 2025, the data shows exactly how these two seemingly contradictory financial realities exist at the same time:

• GoldBod’s Surplus is an Operational Fact: GoldBod closed the 2025 fiscal year with an operational surplus exceeding GH¢5.44 billion. Because GoldBod functions as an executing transaction agent collecting fixed statutory assay fees and service charges on local gold purchases, its corporate ledger is insulated from broader market volatility. It is legally making money based on its designated fee-for-service model.
• The IMF’s Loss is a Macro-Fiscal Fact: The IMF reported that the broader Domestic Gold Purchase Programme generated net policy costs of approximately US$1.7 billion (roughly GH¢22.1 billion) in 2025, equivalent to 1.5% of Ghana’s GDP. These losses do not mean cash was stolen from GoldBod's safes; rather, they represent the expensive premiums, domestic financing costs, and exchange rate differences absorbed at the sovereign level to fund rapid reserve accumulation.
• The Policy Coexistence Principle: As prominent independent Ghanaian economist Dr. Theo Acheampong noted during a recent policy review, "A program can generate profound macroeconomic benefits while simultaneously imposing substantial financial costs on the state's central balance sheet. The two propositions are not mutually exclusive." Defending the policy by looking only at GoldBod's transaction fees ignores the massive bill left behind to achieve that vital currency stability.

The Central Bank as the Risk Bearer: How the Bank of Ghana Absorbed the Bill

To understand where that US$1.7 billion went, we must analyze the specific role of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) as the ultimate financier and risk-bearer of the gold-purchasing framework. GoldBod executed the local purchases, but the BoG’s balance sheet absorbed the structural economic shocks:

• The Premium Liquidity Squeeze: To aggressively rebuild Ghana’s gross international reserves from a historic low of 8 tonnes to over 30 tonnes, the BoG had to heavily incentivize local large-scale mining firms and small-scale miners. This required purchasing domestic gold at highly competitive local premiums that frequently sat above the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) world spot price.
• Cedi Liquidity Offsets: The BoG utilized domestic Cedi liquidity to buy this local gold, turning liquid local currency into illiquid international gold bullion. While this successfully gave the central bank the vital leverage to inject over US$10.6 billion of foreign exchange liquidity back into the market—stabilizing the Cedi from a record depreciation of nearly 54% down to a manageable 11.2% by late 2025—the financing costs of printing and carrying those Cedi positions sat heavily on the BoG's ledger.
• The Negative Carry Trade-Off: Independent financial analyst Prof. Lord Mensah of the University of Ghana Business School has pointed out the structural nature of this deficit: "When a central bank buys gold locally using high-interest domestic liabilities to build an asset that yields no immediate cash dividend, a net negative carry is inevitable. The BoG essentially chose to run a balance sheet deficit to save the national currency."

Formulating a Way Forward: Structural Policy Recommendations

To protect public funds and maintain transparent economic governance, the state must move past defensive public relations and implement clear institutional adjustments:

• Unified Financial Reconciliation: The Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Ghana, and GoldBod must jointly publish a comprehensive, reconciled balance sheet that clearly outlines the net cost-benefit ratio of the gold-purchasing framework.
• Capping Operational Premiums: The central bank must institute strict, transparent price ceilings on the premiums paid to local mining firms to minimize the fiscal distortions highlighted by the IMF.
• Enhanced Parliamentary Oversight: Future macroeconomic interventions of this scale should require quarterly transparency briefings before the Finance Committee to prevent unexpected multi-billion dollar valuation adjustments from shocking the public.
• Elevating Public Communication: Government communication during financial debates must rely entirely on verified accounting evidence and structural data, rather than deploying personal attacks or state-sponsored public relations diversions.

A Word of Advice to Hon. Alexander Afenyo-Markin: Think Deeply Before Speaking

As a high-ranking public official and the Leader of the Minority, Hon. Alexander Afenyo-Markin carries a heavy institutional responsibility. When dealing with complex international financial data, a leader must think deeply and verify institutional structures before speaking publicly.

Conflating the independent operational ledger of GoldBod with the comprehensive macroeconomic policy costs of the Bank of Ghana damages legislative credibility. Rushing to frame complex central bank stabilization costs as corporate malfeasance or proof of internal agency theft misleads the Ghanaian public and reduces vital economic oversight to cheap partisan points. True leadership requires structural precision, deep calculation, and the patience to understand national accounting before mounting the political pulpit.

Moving Beyond Partisan Boxing Matches

The Domestic Gold Purchase Programme demonstrates a powerful economic truth: a national policy can be highly successful in stabilizing the Cedi while simultaneously remaining immensely expensive to maintain. Ghana's economic survival relies entirely on recognizing both parts of this equation.

Ghanaians have every right to demand exact transparency regarding how much national currency stability costs the taxpayer. However, this critical conversation cannot be settled by reducing public finance to a political boxing match between competing parties. For Ghana to maintain its credibility on the global financial stage, its leaders must stop using international auditing data as partisan weapons and start addressing the structural fiscal realities of the state with honesty, maturity, and intellectual depth.

✍️ Submitted by:
Retired Senior Citizen
For and on behalf of all Senior Citizens of the Republic of Ghana 🇬🇭

Teshie-Nungua
akpaluck@gmail.com

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