Let The Finance Ministry Watch COCOBOD Closely - This Time, Watching Is Not An Insult

Somebody has finally said it out loud, and I am glad it did not come from a Ghanaian politician first. It came from the IMF.

In a Technical Assistance Report published in July 2026, and made public in September, the International Monetary Fund told Ghana's Finance Ministry something that should have been common sense many years ago: keep a much closer eye on COCOBOD. Not because cocoa has stopped being the crop that built this country. Not because the farmers have failed us. But because the numbers coming out of the Cocoa Board tell a story that no serious nation can afford to ignore.

Let me put the numbers in front of you plainly, the way my grandmother used to lay out cocoa beans on a mat to dry — one at a time, in the open, where everybody can see.

What The IMF Actually Found
COCOBOD's debts jumped from GH¢14.7 billion in 2020 to GH¢28.5 billion in 2022. That is almost double in two years. By 2023, the debt came down a little, to around GH¢24.5 billion, but the relief did not last. Entering 2025, COCOBOD was sitting on cumulative debt of about GH¢32.9 billion. For the first time in the Board's nearly 80-year history, its liabilities became bigger than its assets. Read that sentence again. A cocoa board that has survived colonial rule, independence, coups, and structural adjustment, now owes more than it owns.

The Board's debt-to-assets ratio has hovered around 90 percent. In simple terms, if COCOBOD were a person, 90 pesewas out of every cedi it holds already belongs to somebody else.

Then came the price shock. Global cocoa prices, which had climbed to around US$7,200 per tonne at the start of the 2025/26 season, crashed to about US$4,100 per tonne — a fall of roughly 43 percent. That kind of drop does not just hurt a company. It hurts a whole industry that carries close to 10 percent of Ghana's export earnings and touches the lives of about 800,000 farming households across our cocoa regions.

On top of the money problems, the IMF also pointed at how COCOBOD spent under its old road-building programme, known as COCOROADS. An audit by Ghana's own Auditor-General found that 87 percent of contracts in that portfolio were given out directly, without competitive bidding. To be fair to the current Board, which took office in January 2025, the Fund itself said this finding relates to the past, not to the present management. The present Board says it has stopped building roads altogether and handed that job back to the Ministry of Roads and Highways, where it belongs.

But the debt problem is very much a today problem. COCOBOD owes the Finance Ministry GH¢3.7 billion from converted cocoa bills. It owes the Bank of Ghana GH¢1.38 billion. It could not even pay the final part of its 2024 syndicated loan, so the Finance Ministry had to step in with a US$70 million bridge loan just to stop a default. That is the government borrowing to save the cocoa board from embarrassment on the world stage.

This is why the IMF wants COCOBOD's quasi-fiscal activities — spending that behaves like government spending but sits outside the normal budget rules — to end completely. In its place, the Fund and the Ministry of Finance are pushing for a domestic cocoa bond-based revolving fund, replacing the old foreign syndicated loan model that has run for more than thirty years. Government has also agreed to convert about GH¢5 billion of COCOBOD's legacy debt into equity, to give the Board a fighting chance at a healthier balance sheet.

Here Is My Honest Opinion, And I Want You To Argue With Me

I believe this is the single most positive thing to come out of Ghana's cocoa story in years, and I say that fully expecting some readers to disagree with me hard.

Why do I call it positive? Because for once, the warning came before the collapse, not after it. Ghana has a painful habit of discovering that a state institution is in trouble only when it can no longer pay salaries or meet its obligations. This time, the Fund is telling us, on paper, with numbers, exactly where the cracks are — the debt ratio, the price exposure, the governance gaps — while there is still time to act. That is a gift, not an insult.

And closer monitoring, done honestly, protects the people who never get invited to these conversations: the cocoa farmer in Sefwi, the young man loading cocoa bags at Takoradi port, the woman selling food at a buying-station in the Western North. If COCOBOD's finances are watched properly by the Ministry of Finance and if the reforms — the equity conversion, the domestic bond fund, the tighter procurement rules — are actually followed through, it is these ordinary Ghanaians whose livelihoods get protected first, not the executives in air-conditioned offices in Accra.

Now here is where I expect the argument to start.

The Other Side Of The Argument
Not everyone sees this recommendation as good news, and I will not pretend otherwise, because a real opinion piece must show you both sides of the cocoa pod.

Some Ghanaians, including members of Parliament, have already pushed back hard. The MP for South Dayi, Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor, has publicly accused the IMF of bias in how it frames these state-owned enterprise reports, suggesting the timing and tone of such findings can be used as a political weapon against whichever government is in power. There is something worth taking seriously in that concern. Ghana has surrendered a lot of economic decision-making to external lenders over the decades, and every time the IMF speaks, some citizens rightly ask: who elected them to run our cocoa sector?

There is also a fair worry about sovereignty. COCOBOD is not just a business. It is a piece of Ghana's national identity, built by our own hands after independence to make sure foreign buyers could never again dictate what our farmers earn. Handing more oversight power to the Finance Ministry, guided by conditions written in Washington, can feel to some like giving away control of something we fought to keep.

I understand that discomfort. I simply do not think it should stop us from fixing what is broken. A doctor telling you that your blood pressure is dangerously high is not trying to control your life. He is trying to keep you alive long enough to keep living it your own way.

Bringing It Home, Ghanaian Style
Every Ghanaian household with a grandmother who farmed cocoa knows this truth: you do not wait until the cocoa tree is dying to check on it. You walk the farm regularly. You look at the leaves, the pods, the soil, before the disease spreads. That is exactly what closer monitoring of COCOBOD means — walking the farm before the tree falls, not writing its eulogy after.

We are a nation of cocoa. It paid for our roads, our schools, our first hospitals, long before oil was found under our waters. If keeping that legacy alive means the Finance Ministry checks the books more often and asks harder questions before money leaves the Board's accounts, then let it be so. Let the checking be strict. Let it be fair. Let it protect the farmer first.

A Word From Me, Personally
I did not write this piece to defend the IMF, and I certainly did not write it to attack our own institutions. I wrote it because too many conversations about COCOBOD happen in whispers, in boardrooms, in political rallies where numbers get thrown around without evidence. I wanted my readers — market women, students, taxi drivers, engineers like myself still training at Accra Technical University — to see the actual figures for themselves and decide honestly what they think. I have given you my opinion plainly. Now I invite you to disagree with me, in the comment section, at the chop bar, in the trotro. That disagreement, argued with facts, is exactly how a democracy stays healthy.

About the Author
Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian author, columnist, filmmaker, and digital content creator based in Accra. He is the founder of Brownsy Silva Company, a multi-disciplinary creative platform spanning novels, films, and commentary on Ghanaian economic and social affairs. He writes opinion columns for Modern Ghana, read by a diaspora audience across the UK, USA, Canada, and Germany, and is a student of software and mechanical engineering at Accra Technical University.