Professor of Finance and Economics at the University of Ghana, Godfred Bokpin, has criticised Ghana’s budgetary framework, arguing that it enables state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to underperform without consequence.
Speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show on Monday, September 1, during a discussion on the latest State Ownership Report by the State Interests and Governance Authority (SIGA), Prof. Bokpin said SOEs are routinely supported with state resources regardless of performance.
“It’s more of the same. There’s no incentive to do well and better. This country has accepted this poor performance and we reward it adequately,” he said.
According to him, the national budget annually makes provisions to subsidise SOEs, often with taxpayers’ money, leaving little motivation for improvement.
“In 2023, if you look at our national budget, you’ll find under the resource allocation framework an item called ‘other expenditure.’ This covers energy sector levies and transfers to meet energy sector shortfalls and other SOEs, just to keep them afloat apart from the revenue they generate from their core activities,” he explained.
Prof. Bokpin said inefficiencies are passed on to citizens through levies such as the Energy Sector Levy (ESLA) and the recently introduced one-cedi fuel levy.
“If you look at the kind of incentive mechanism we’ve put in place, really there’s very little motivation to do well because there are no punishments linked to poor performance, and nobody gets sacked,” he stressed.
Political Patronage and Rising Costs
The professor further argued that many SOEs have become channels for political patronage rather than efficiency.
“If you lift the veil, you realise that some of these SOEs have become the medium through which politicians reward political financiers and party loyalists. That weakens our ability to demand efficiency from them,” he said.
He pointed to the steady rise in allocations for “other expenditure” in recent budgets, noting that the figure increased from GH₵23.7 billion in 2023 to GH₵27.7 billion in 2024, and further to GH₵33.6 billion in 2025, even higher than capital expenditure allocations.
Prof. Bokpin also claimed some SOE executives enjoy greater perks than sector ministers with far less scrutiny.
“It is sometimes better to be a CEO of some of these SOEs or a senior person in those organisations than being a sector minister because of the reward mechanisms and the less monitoring by citizens and the media,” he observed.
He further questioned the sharp rise in administrative costs of SOEs compared to private firms in similar sectors.
“The other thing to also look at is to see some of these state-owned enterprises and see the rise in their administrative cost, over a period, and then you can compare that to similar companies in the private sector along those same lines, and you will see inefficiency.
“Even though the SIGA report says there have been gains in operational efficiency, if you do sector comparisons where there are relevant private companies, you will see inefficiency that is ultimately passed on to the taxpayer,” Prof. Bokpin added.