Ghana keeps adding watchdogs: why is the money still going missing?

Ghana has just done something it is very good at.

It has created a new institution to tell government not to waste money.

will these watchdogs merely bark, or they will bite this time?

On September 8, President Mahama inaugurated a five-member Independent Fiscal Council at the Presidency, sworn in under the Public Financial Management (Amendment) Act, 2025, to scrutinise government spending, assess compliance with fiscal rules, and monitor debt sustainability.

Two days later, on the other side of the same reform push, the Value for Money Office, signed into law back in May, chronically understaffed since has finally got an Acting Director-General: a Harvard-trained lawyer tasked with making sure, in the President’s own words, that “every cedi of public expenditure serves the public good.”

Two brand-new bodies. Two solemn ceremonies. Two mandates that, read side by side, amount to roughly the same sentence: please, government, stop wasting the money.

At this rate, Ghana may soon have enough watchdogs to form a kennel.

And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

The problem is what happens after the barking.

Which raises a question Ghana has been too polite to ask out loud:

How many institutions does it take to tell government not to waste money, before government simply stops wasting it?

A crowded accountability architecture

Ghana already has a dense ecosystem of fiscal watchdogs and oversight bodies.

We have already spent an entire editorial on Ghana’s addiction to forming committees; the ”galamsey” committees, the Bawku committees, the constitutional review committees reviewing earlier committees. The Fiscal Council and the Value for Money Office are not, technically, committees. That is what makes them more interesting, and more damning.

A committee can be quietly dissolved when its findings become inconvenient. These two cannot easily, anyway. The Fiscal Council has statutory backing and a four-year term. The Value for Money Office has its own Act of Parliament, its own budget line, its own Director-General answerable under the Constitution. These are not sitting-allowance talking shops. They are permanent additions to the organisational chart of Ghanaian accountability.

Which means Ghana has not just formed another committee this time.

Ghana has built an entire new floor onto a building that was already, on paper, fully staffed for this exact job.

The Building Was Already Full

Here is the part nobody at either inauguration ceremony seemed eager to dwell on: Ghana did not lack institutions whose entire purpose is to stop government wasting money. It has had them for decades.

There is the Auditor-General, empowered under Article 187 of the 1992 Constitution to audit every public account in the land and flag exactly this kind of thing. There is the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, whose job is to sit publicly on camera and grill officials over what the Auditor-General finds. There is the Procurement Authority, which exists specifically to police how public contracts get awarded. There is the Economic and Organised Crime Office, whose entire mandate is chasing the money once it is gone missing. Ghanaians will remember the Auditor-General flagging GH¢5.4 billion in questionable contract claims years ago a figure serious enough to make headlines, and apparently not serious enough to change a single procurement habit that followed it.

So, when the finance minister told Parliament the Value for Money Office was needed to fight “inflated contract sums, abandoned projects, cost overruns and wasteful public spending,” the honest response is not applause. It is a question: which of the four existing institutions with overlapping jurisdiction over that exact list already told us this, and what happened after they did?

Even Parliament’s own Finance Committee had to concede the point. The Ghana Institute of Procurement and Supply formally petitioned MPs in March, warning that the new Office’s objectives “overlap significantly” with the Procurement Authority’s existing mandate. The Committee’s response, roughly paraphrased: yes, that’s a real risk, we should probably write some clearer boundaries into law at some point.

Ghana identified the redundancy before the ink was dry and built the redundancy anyway.

The watchdog that Is not watching yet

The Value for Money Office, created explicitly to catch wasteful spending before contracts are signed, spent its first four months after royal assent with no director, no staff, and by its own government’s Mid-Year Fiscal Policy Review is not expected to be fully operational until end-June 2027.

In the meantime, Ghana’s Big Push Infrastructure Programme has ploughed ahead across all sixteen regions 87 projects, 13 already past the halfway mark while US$1.7 billion sits ring-fenced at the Bank of Ghana specifically to pay for the Accra-Kumasi Expressway the moment a contract is signed.

That is not a hypothetical future test case for the Value for Money Office. That is real money, moving right now, on the government’s largest infrastructure bet in years and the institution built to ask, “is this the right project, at the right price, built the right way?” is currently a Harvard-trained lawyer and an acting title, still waiting on its governing board and its staff.

We built the smoke detector. We are still assembling it while the kitchen is already on the stove.

Accountability that only works when your opponents are in office is not accountability. It is a partisan entertaiment.

Watching Is Not the Same as Working

None of this is an argument against oversight. Oversight, done properly, is exactly what a country with Ghana’s fiscal history needs. The Fiscal Council’s chair, a former Standard Chartered board chairman, and its members a former Bank of Ghana Governor, a University of Ghana Business School professor, respected policy economists represent genuine technical firepower.

The problem was never the watching. Ghana has never lacked people willing to watch, write reports, and hold press conferences about what they found.

The problem is what happens the Monday morning after the report lands.

Here is the pattern every one of these bodies inherits, whether they like it or not: the Auditor-General’s findings go to Parliament. Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee holds hearings, sometimes genuinely fierce ones, officials sweating under questioning on live television.

Then nothing that resembles a consequence with teeth. No prosecution pipeline that reliably closes. No mandatory recovery of misappropriated funds enforced with any consistency. No minister who signed off on an inflated contract losing their job over it in a way the public actually sees. The finding is real. The accountability is theatre.

Adding a Fiscal Council on top of that pipeline gives Ghana a sharper diagnosis. Adding a Value for Money Office gives Ghana an earlier warning system. Neither one, by itself, gives Ghana a working court date, a working recovery mechanism, or a working political cost for ignoring what these institutions eventually, inevitably, find.

A watchdog that cannot bite is eventually just an expensive pet.

The Real Reform Nobody Wants to Legislate

Ghana can keep adding watchdogs until every corridor of State House has a council, office or commissioning peering over someones shoulder or it can decide that the next reform is not another institution but a system thst automatically cost someone their job, reputation and their money.

That legislation does not need a five-member board. It does not need a Harvard-trained director. It needs political will that has, so far, proven the scarcest resource in the entire Ghanaian accountability ecosystem; scarcer than the money itself.

Until that exists, Ghana will keep doing what it has always done best: building increasingly credentialed rooms full of increasingly qualified people.

Ghana does not need a sixth watchdog. It needs one bite.