Four shocks, no crisis: Finance Minister says last year’s savings made the difference
A slump in cocoa prices, deadly floods, a fire at a key power installation and turmoil around the Strait of Hormuz: Ghana has absorbed all four this year. Finance Minister Dr Cassiel Ato Forson says the reason it has not tipped into an economic crisis is that the government spent 2025 building a cushion.
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Friday, November 13, Dr Forson said the fiscal and external buffers put in place last year gave the economy room to take unexpected blows. In his telling, without them the shocks could have caused real damage.
He ranked the fall in world cocoa prices as the most serious. Under normal conditions, he said, it could have pushed the country into crisis.
The June 29 floods were another test. He explained that the emergency response and rebuilding they demanded threatened to add spending that nobody had budgeted for.
The third shock was the fire at the Akosombo switchyard, which left more than 1,020 megawatts of generating capacity unable to reach the grid, a problem he said the country had to work through.
The last came from abroad. Dr Forson said developments around the Strait of Hormuz have disrupted global economic activity and put pressure on economies in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa.
His conclusion was direct. “Obviously, because of the measures we put in place in 2025, we built both external and fiscal buffers,” he said. “That is why we’ve been able to go through these difficulties.”
He did not give figures in the remarks reported here for how large the buffers are or how much each shock cost.
Source: CNR
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