Ghana’s Favourite Solution Is Another Committee

There is a special moment in Ghanaian governance when a problem becomes too difficult to solve.

It is not the moment government admits defeat. No.

It is the moment somebody says: “Let’s form a committee.”

And suddenly, everybody relaxes. Problem solved.

Well… not exactly.

But at least the problem is now under investigation. In Ghana, that can sometimes pass for progress.

Ghana has an abundance of diagnosis and a chronic shortage of consequence.

When in Doubt, Form a Committee

There is almost a Ghanaian formula for solving national problems:

Problem → outrage → press conference → committee → meetings → report → recommendations → silence.

We have perfected the cycle.

Galamsey is perhaps the clearest example.

Governments have announced task forces, enforcement operations, committees and new strategies over the years. In February 2025, for instance, an 18-member technical committee was inaugurated to develop a blueprint for reforming and sanitising the mining sector. It was given two weeks to submit its report.

The problem with committees is not that they are useless. Some problems genuinely require experts, investigation and consultation nobody is asking a minister to freelance a mining policy from the back of a ”trotro”.

The problem is when forming the committee becomes the action, when the inauguration ceremony gets more press coverage than the eventual (if ever) implementation.

Because a committee is supposed to help government solve a problem. It is not supposed to become the place where the problem goes to enjoy retirement, full pension, no exit interview.

As a concerned citizen, this pattern is outdated for societal growth.

We Love “Stakeholder Engagement”

There is another phrase Ghanaian governance loves almost as much:

“Stakeholder engagement.”

Beautiful phrase. Very respectable. Very democratic. And capable of keeping a problem gainfully busy for months without ever touching it.

We engage stakeholders about flooding. We engage stakeholders about sanitation. We engage stakeholders about ”galamsey” repeatedly, across at least four different administrations, with broadly the same stakeholders saying broadly the same things into broadly the same microphones.

Meanwhile, the gutter is still blocked. The road is still flooded. The river, the actual, physical Pra, Ankobra, Offin, is still the colour of a cappuccino, and increasingly the reason experts warn Ghana could be importing water by 2030 if the poisoning of these bodies is not reversed.

That is not a committee’s failure to communicate. That is a nation’s failure to act on what it has communicated to itself for over a decade.

Ghana Does not Lack Ideas

This is what makes the whole thing frustrating.

We are not short of intelligent people. We have professors, economists, engineers, lawyers, researchers, policy experts and enough television analysts to run a small parliament several of whom, incidentally, have sat on more than one of these committees across different administrations, which tells its own quiet story about how small and recycled the “expert” pool really is.

We already know many of our problems, in granular, well-documented detail. Take ”galamsey” specifically. We know it is destroying water bodies. We know forests and cocoa farms are being sold off and gutted for the fertile soil beneath them. We know illegal mining networks exist, some allegedly protected by political financiers. We know enforcement is weak, and we know because a government’s own committee said so that some of the enablers sit inside the state itself.

So at some point, the question cannot always be:

“What else should we investigate?”

It has to be:

“Who is responsible for acting and what happens when they do not?”

The Sitting Allowance Problem

And then there is the little Ghanaian detail nobody wants to discuss too loudly: ”sitting allowance”.

Suddenly, there is a venue. There are folders. There are refreshments. There are nameplates. There are minutes, typed and bound. Everybody is sitting. Everybody is working. Everybody is serious.

The only person not sitting is the problem.

The problem is standing outside, getting worse, while the per diem clears.

This is not a conspiracy theory it is an incentive structure. When committee membership pays regardless of outcome and when the committee’s dissolution is functionally the only “deadline” anyone enforces, you have quietly built a system where prolonging the problem is more lucrative, for a select few, than solving it.

Nobody has to be corrupt for this to happen. The incentives do the corrupting on their own.

The Report Has Arrived. Now What?

Eventually, the committee produces its report.

It is beautifully written. There is an executive summary. There are recommendations. There are charts. There are appendices. There may even be photographs of the committee members looking appropriately concerned, standing beside a table draped in the national colours.

The report is presented. Applause. Then silence.

Six months later, somebody asks about it. “We are studying the recommendations.”

A year later: “We are engaging stakeholders.”

Two years later, a new committee is inaugurated to look at essentially the same file sometimes, remarkably, with an overlapping membership list.

By then, the original problem has probably found a new problem to marry, and their children chronic pollution, lost revenue, eroded public trust are already in school.

This is where we need to distinguish activity from achievement. A meeting is not a result. A report is not a result. A committee is certainly not a result.

They are means to an end. The end is supposed to be something actually changing. A river running clear again, an excavator recovered and its owner prosecuted, a Bawku ceasefire that holds past the news cycle.

The Committee Must Leave the Room

Perhaps this is the real problem.

Too much of our governance happens around tables. The committee discusses the flooded community. The report discusses the polluted river. The task force discusses the broken institution. Everyone discusses. Rarely does anyone own the follow-through once the cameras and the per diem stop.

But eventually, somebody has to leave the conference room and meet reality.

Because government is not ultimately tested by how impressive its meetings look, or how credentialed its committee members are, or how thick its final report is. It is tested by what citizens experience afterwards.

Can they drink the water? Can they use the road? Can they get the service? Can they see where their taxes and the committee’s sitting allowances actually went? Can they point to something and say.

“Yes. This actually changed.”

That is the test. By that test, ”galamsey” policy alone has now failed under NDC and NPP governments alike, across nearly four decades and at least half a dozen named task forces and committees which should tell us the problem was never really a shortage of institutional architecture.

It was always a shortage of political will to let any of that architecture actually bite.

Maybe We Need One Final Committee

So perhaps we should form one final committee.

Its mandate should be simple: Find out why Ghana keeps forming committees instead of solving problems.

Give it a chairman. A vice-chairman. A secretary. A technical team. A subcommittee. Then another subcommittee to coordinate the subcommittee, and perhaps a fourth-quarter progress-review sub-subcommittee, because by now we have the muscle memory.

Let them hold stakeholder engagements. Let them organise workshops. Let them take photographs. Let them produce a 600-page report, bound in leather, with a foreword from someone important.

And when they finish, we can place it carefully on the shelf beside all the others next to the ”galamsey” reports, the Bawku reports, the constitutional review reports of decades past.

Or this would be a truly revolutionary idea we could act.

We have investigated enough. We have consulted enough. We have launched enough. We have formed enough committees.

The next national breakthrough should not be another committee.

It should be a result.

Because after all the meetings, reports and stakeholder engagements after 4,500 deported miners in 2013 and a presidency staked on the fight in 2017 and an 18-member committee with a two-week ultimatum in 2025 the ordinary Ghanaian deserves to ask one brutally simple question:

“So after all this sitting, what exactly have we solved?”