If a Chatbot Can Be Held to Account, Why Can't a Minister?

Ghanafuor, the most useful ruling I have read this year came from a Canadian tribunal, and it settles a question Ghana has refused to settle for itself.

A grieving man asked Air Canada's website chatbot whether he could fly to a funeral at a bereavement fare. The machine told him to book at the full price and claim the difference afterwards. He did as instructed. The airline refused to pay. He took it to a tribunal, where Air Canada advanced a defence worth pausing over: it could not be held responsible for what its own agent had said. The agent, the airline suggested, was a separate entity answerable for its own actions. The tribunal member called that submission remarkable, and made the airline pay.

Remarkable in Canada. Routine in Accra.
When a road collapses within a year of construction, the ministry points at the contractor. When a power agreement turns septic, the government points at the concessionaire. When the debt falls due, this administration points at the last one. Each time, the state is telling us, with a straight face and a press statement, that it cannot be held responsible for what its own agents did. And each time, we move on to the next scandal, because there is no one to hold.

I want to take this seriously rather than angrily, because anger has not worked and analysis might.

Begin at first principles, with the oldest problem in economics and the newest technology.

Adam Smith noticed in 1776 that managers of other people's money will not watch over it as carefully as the owners would. Stephen Ross gave the problem its name in 1973, and every institutional device we have invented since exists to manage it: boards, audits, vesting, carried interest. Notice what all of those devices do. They protect the principal from the agent. They align the agent with the principal. Not one of them does anything for the person sitting on the other side of the table, the citizen, the customer, the villager whose land is under discussion. To that person, a perfectly loyal agent is a perfectly partisan one.

Now the crucial step, and the one our rulers have never taken. Trust in an economy is not a function of competence. It is a function of consequence. You do not trust the sharpest lawyer in Accra more than the dullest judge; you trust the one whose name is on the judgment and whose reputation dies with it. When the assistant emails to arrange the meeting, you look at whose assistant it is. Nobody has ever trusted an agent on its own. They trust the principal standing behind it.

Thurlow, Lord Chancellor of England, said of a corporation that it has neither a soul to lose nor a body to kick. He was right, and it took the West two centuries to answer him: charters that said what a company was for, accounts that had to be kept and audited and published, brands that could be punished by customers, assets that could be seized by courts. The corporation became trustworthy only when it became visible, and it became visible only when it could lose something.

Hold those two propositions together, and Ghana's condition stops looking like a failure of personnel and starts looking like a design flaw so deep that no election can reach it.

Our public life is built so that nobody is the principal. The signature is institutional. The decision is collective. The responsibility is diffuse. A minister contracts a loan and leaves office. A board approves a guarantee and is reconstituted. The state guarantees, and the state is everyone, which is another way of saying nobody. When the bill arrives, it is not answered. It is announced away from a podium, and a fresh set of officials inherits the obligation along with the furniture.

This is where my argument will lose me friends, and it is where the country most needs it said. State capture and rent-seeking are not, in the first instance, moral failures. They are the rational strategy of persons operating inside a system with no principal. If nobody is accountable and nothing carries a name, then extracting value is not a crime, it is arbitrage. You take the rent because the only cost of taking it is criticism, and criticism has been made the one thing the system punishes reliably.

Note that. It is the tell. A principal expects to be around and can therefore be argued with. He has to keep dealing with the same people, so he takes the correction, because next year he will need them. An agent with nothing to lose has no reason to tolerate a word of dissent. So the ruling elite grows hard of hearing at exactly the rate it grows unaccountable. When criticism of a decision is reframed as insult to the person, and criticism of an office is treated as an attack on a party or an ethnicity, you are watching an agent declare in public that it has nothing to lose. That is not strength. It is the announcement of a vacancy.

The PDS concession is the laboratory specimen. A concession signed in July 2018, ended in October 2019, and litigated for six years. In November 2025 an LCIA tribunal under Toby Landau KC dismissed a US$390 million claim, held the Al Koot guarantees void ab initio, declined jurisdiction over the Interim Protocol and made no finding that the GH¢850 million was owed. Around 66 accounts were frozen. Four people were detained on bail later raised from GH¢50 million to GH¢100 million. By October 2026, seven years after the concession collapsed, no one had been charged. Ghana lost roughly US$190 million in MCC compact funding. And the underlying accounts, which would tell any honest reader who signed what and on whose advice, remain unpublished.

That is what it looks like when a state has no body to kick. We can find the money. We cannot find the man.

Consider the contrast nearer to the bone. ECG's 2025 audited figures show revenue of GH¢22.11 billion against electricity purchases of GH¢34.8 billion and a loss after tax of GH¢2.52 billion, with US$1.7 billion in net payables to independent power producers and fuel suppliers by March 2026. That is not a mystery or a misfortune. It is a set of numbers produced by a set of signatures. We publish the loss and never the ledger of who agreed to it. Then we announce a settlement, and reconciliation is deferred to a committee.

So here is my old-fashioned proposal, offered as a constitutional habit rather than a bill.

Every loan, guarantee, concession and settlement the Republic signs should be entered in a public register under the names of the officials who negotiated it, the officials who approved it, and the advisers who were paid to recommend it. Those names should remain attached until the last pesewa is repaid, whether the persons concerned are in office, in opposition, retired, ennobled or dead. Not to punish them. To give the debt a body to kick. Put a man's name in a register and he becomes careful about what he signs, because he has become a principal, and principals expect to be around.

And on the same principle, the accreditation this country won on 10 November, when the Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund became a National Direct Access Entity of the Green Climate Fund at the Fund's 46th board meeting in Songdo, should be treated as what it is: an asset with a name on it. Ghana can now apply directly, in its own name, for grants and concessional loans, without standing in a queue held by foreigners. At that same meeting the Fund approved 21 proposals worth US$1.86 billion. That door opens onto real money for forests, soil, water and the villages that keep them. It will also be the first thing lost if we treat a fiduciary accreditation as a press release, and go on announcing what we cannot reconcile.

Ghanafuor, this is not a country without capable people. It is a country whose capable people are all agents, and whose principals are all fictions: the Ministry, the Board, the State, the Party. Build one visible, named, accountable principal into the machinery of public finance, and watch how quickly the rent-seekers discover the virtue of caution.

The tribunal in Canada understood that whoever appoints the agent answers for the agent. That is not a foreign doctrine. It is what every Ghanaian market woman already practises when she refuses to give goods on credit to a man who will not put his name to the transaction. She knows what our rulers have forgotten: a word is only a bond when there is somebody behind it who will still be here tomorrow.

As one always says, clarity of thought matters paaa, oooo, Ghanafuor. Yooooooooooo. A word to the wise…

#Accountability #PrincipalAgentProblem #PublicFinance #StateCapture #RuleOfLaw #Governance #Ghana