The Debt Is Cleared, They Say. So Why Is Nobody Reconciled?

Ghanafuor, President Mahama, speaking to Ghanaians in Moscow on 30 October, gave the country good news. "I'm happy to announce that we have cleared the IPP debt. That is, we are current. Any energy they supply today, we're paying them."

He put what his government inherited at about US$1.7 billion owed to the independent power producers, plus arrears for gas from the Jubilee Field and from ENI. Settling that matters. Generators that are not paid stop generating, and a country that cannot pay for power at dusk is a country with no evening light.

But read the sentence again, because it makes two claims and only one of them can be a fact.

"We are current" is a statement about this month's bill. "We have cleared the debt" is a statement about a stock that accumulated over years. They are not the same, and the second is the one that requires a reconciliation to prove.

The IMF's review, reported in September, puts net payables to IPPs and fuel suppliers at US$1.7 billion in March 2026, down from US$2.1 billion at the end of 2024. That is progress. It is not zero. Somewhere between the podium in Moscow and the Fund's tables, a number needs to be published.

Ghanafuor, this is the accursed Ghanaian habit, and it is not confined to energy. We announce. We do not reconcile.

Nowhere is that habit more expensive than in the wreckage of PDS.

A concession was signed in July 2018, backed by a US$500 million American compact, and PDS took over ECG's distribution in March 2019. It collapsed in October that year when the payment guarantees, supposedly issued by Al Koot Insurance in Qatar, turned out never to have been authorised.

In November 2025, a London tribunal chaired by Toby Landau KC dismissed PDS's claim of about US$390 million in its entirety. The guarantees were void from the outset. The government was entitled to terminate. Ghana won.

But look at what the tribunal did next, because it is the part nobody quotes. It declined jurisdiction over the Interim Protocol that governed the parties' money after the suspension. It therefore made no finding that PDS owed ECG GH¢850 million, or a billion, or anything at all. It sent them back to reconcile their accounts.

That was the mature thing to do. A commercial account is a set of entries, not a moral verdict. Invalid guarantees and a disputed balance are two different questions, and a serious legal system separates them.

The state did not.

Since March and April, about 66 accounts have been frozen, some of them personal and unconnected to PDS. Four people, among them a former board chairman, a board secretary, a lawyer and a project director, were detained, granted bail of GH¢50 million each, and had it doubled within a week to GH¢100 million. They cannot travel. They report to EOCO three times a week. Five months on, nobody has been charged.

OccupyGhana said it plainly on 30 September. Due process is not an obstacle to fighting corruption. It is what makes prosecutions sustainable and recoveries lawful.

And this is not only an argument. In the Sesi-Edem case, EOCO froze a company's accounts over a gold supply contract, obtained an ex parte confirmation order in January 2026, and on 19 March 2026 the High Court at Adentan revoked it and ordered the accounts unfrozen, finding that EOCO had acted outside its mandate in what was a commercial dispute. A court has already said it.

Consider what the other side has placed on the record. According to CalBank's statement, PDS paid about GH¢1.6 billion to ECG during the concession, about GH¢200 million to GRIDCo and about GH¢130 million to the GRA. That proves nothing on its own. It does explain why the tribunal wanted an accountant before a prosecutor.

And here is the arithmetic that should end the shouting. GH¢850 million is 3.8 per cent of ECG's 2025 revenue of GH¢22.11 billion. It would cut last year's loss after tax of GH¢2.52 billion by about a third. It is roughly nine days of the GH¢34.8 billion ECG spends buying electricity in a year.

So this was never really about the money. At stake is whether a Ghanaian company can be investigated without being ruined first, and whether the state can recover what it is owed without inventing the debt in a holding cell.

The cost of getting it wrong is already on the books. Ghana forfeited about US$190 million of Millennium Challenge compact funding when the concession died, confirmed by the Ministry of Energy a year ago. That money is gone whoever is charged.

And the stakes are rising, not falling. A transaction adviser has been appointed to bring private operators back into ECG's billing, metering and collection, with awards expected by June 2027. So the country is preparing to sign the same kind of contract that cost it US$190 million and seven years. Any serious bidder is now pricing in what happened to the last one.

ECG's underlying problem will not be solved by a recovery of any size. Electricity purchases of GH¢34.8 billion against revenue of GH¢22.11 billion, distribution losses of 27.1 per cent, collection of 86 per cent of what is billed, arrears that peaked near US$3.5 billion. That is a structural illness, and no tribunal and no arrest will treat it.

But credibility is treatable. Publish the confirmed figure for the IPP settlement, and the reconciliation that proves it. Publish the reconciliation of the Interim Protocol and let the GH¢850 million be either a debt or a fiction, in writing, with entries. Charge the people the evidence supports, and release the accounts the evidence does not.

Ghanafuor, a country that can produce accounts can recover money. A country that only produces announcements will keep losing it, and will keep being surprised. Clarity of thought matters paaa, oooo. Yooooooooooo. A word to the wise...