GH-D-02: The 2022 Domestic Debt Exchange Programme and the 2023 IMF Extended Credit Facility (2020–2025)

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Version Date: 2026-05-15

1. Key Takeaways

The 5 December 2022 Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP), announced by Minister of Finance Ken Ofori-Atta in a Ministry of Finance press conference, was the largest sovereign-domestic-debt restructuring in sub-Saharan African history and the first sovereign default of a Ghanaian government in the Fourth-Republic period (1992–). The Programme covered approximately ₵137 billion of cedi-denominated bonds across categories of individual investors, pension funds, banks, insurance companies, collective investment schemes, and Bank of Ghana holdings. The original terms — released the same day — proposed an exchange of all eligible bonds for a menu of new instruments featuring zero coupons through FY 2023, gradually rising to 5–10% coupons by 2025–2027, with tenors extending to 2032 and 2033, and no nominal-principal haircut but substantial present-value loss through coupon compression and tenor extension. The launch was met within forty-eight hours by sustained civil-society and bondholder opposition that produced material design modifications between December 2022 and February 2023.
The DDEP was the structural precondition for the 17 May 2023 IMF Executive Board approval of a 36-month, USD 3 billion Extended Credit Facility — Ghana's seventeenth IMF programme since independence and the third programme of the post-2009 period (after the 2009 Mills-era programme and the 2015–2019 Mahama-era programme). The IMF programme's debt-sustainability framework required a debt-stock reduction sufficient to bring the present-value-of-debt-to-GDP ratio to a "moderate risk" threshold by 2028; the design of the DDEP — and subsequently of the external-debt restructuring — was substantially conditioned by that framework. The 17 May 2023 first tranche of USD 600 million was disbursed immediately upon Board approval; cumulative disbursements through the Fourth Review (April 2025) reached approximately USD 2.4 billion.
The DDEP's distributional incidence has been the most contested element of the post-2022 economic-policy record. The original 5 December 2022 terms exempted no category of bondholder; the initial response from the Pensioners Association of Ghana (the 27 December 2022 picket at the Ministry of Finance, the parallel public letter to the President), from the Ghana Individual Bondholders Forum (formed in the second half of December 2022), and from the financial-institutions cluster produced the 31 January 2023 Amended and Restated Offer. The amended terms exempted individual bondholders below specified thresholds (initially ₵25,000 in aggregate holdings; subsequently broadened), introduced modified terms for pension funds (reduced haircut and selected coupon protection), and created a Ghana Financial Stability Fund (operationalised through World Bank co-financing) to address bank and insurance recapitalisation costs. The 14 February 2023 final settlement reported approximately 85% participation among eligible bondholders.
The 14 February 2023 settlement's 85% participation rate was the principal political-economic-output of the seventy-day negotiation between launch and close. The fiscal-savings stream produced by the DDEP — estimated by the Ministry of Finance at approximately ₵61 billion through the 2024–2027 period — was the central debt-sustainability building block within the IMF programme architecture. The principal political-economic cost, beyond the immediate distributional incidence, was the durable erosion of public confidence in the Ghanaian state's commitment to honour cedi-denominated obligations; the post-DDEP Bank-of-Ghana primary-market dynamics for cedi-denominated securities required cumulative re-architecting through 2023–2025 to restore depth.
The 19 December 2022 Ministry of Finance announcement of the suspension of debt-service payments on certain external commercial debt (Eurobonds and selected commercial loans) and on the non-Paris-Club bilateral debt of selected creditors was the formal declaration of external default. Fitch Ratings downgraded Ghana's local-currency long-term issuer rating to Restricted Default on 21 December 2022; the Eurobond foreign-currency rating was downgraded to RD in February 2023 following formal non-payment. Moody's and S&P Global issued parallel actions. The cumulative sovereign-credit position through the period 2022–2024 was the lowest in Ghanaian post-independence history.
The external-debt restructuring proceeded under the G20 Common Framework — the post-COVID multilateral sovereign-debt-restructuring architecture established in November 2020 — in two phases. The bilateral-debt phase produced the formation of an Official Creditor Committee co-chaired by China and France in June 2023; a preliminary Memorandum of Understanding on 12 January 2024; and a final agreement on 11 June 2024 covering approximately USD 5.4 billion of bilateral debt with tenor extensions, partial principal reductions, and reduced interest rates. Ghana was the third Common Framework case (after Chad in 2022 and Zambia in 2023) to reach a final bilateral agreement; the procedural-architecture of the Framework — particularly the role of China as co-chair — has been a substantial topic of international-financial-policy commentary.
The commercial-debt phase, covering approximately USD 13.1 billion of Eurobond principal, was conducted with a Bondholder Steering Committee through 2023–2024. The 3 October 2024 Exchange Offer was launched after extended negotiations and a formal "comparability of treatment" determination relative to the bilateral agreement; the Offer closed on 6 November 2024 with approximately 95% participation. The exchange terms produced an estimated present-value haircut of approximately 37%; new instruments were issued in late November 2024 at coupons ranging from 5.0% to 6.4%, with tenors extending to 2030 and beyond. The completion of the external-debt restructuring two weeks before the 7 December 2024 election was a politically consequential pre-election fiscal-policy achievement whose timing and political incidence remain contested in the post-event commentary.
The macroeconomic recovery through the IMF programme period showed substantial improvement on multiple indicators. Headline inflation declined from a peak of 54.1% (December 2022) to 23.2% (December 2023) to approximately 23% (late 2024); the cedi stabilised in the ¢14.0–¢15.5/USD range through 2023 and 2024; gross international reserves recovered from a trough below USD 1.5 billion (October 2022) to approximately USD 8.9 billion (October 2024, including encumbered reserves). The primary fiscal balance moved from a deficit of −4.3% of GDP (FY 2022) to a surplus of +0.3% (FY 2024 outturn), the first primary surplus since 2014. The Bank of Ghana Monetary Policy Committee, chaired through 2024 by Governor Dr Ernest Addison, held the Policy Rate at a peak of 30.0% from March 2023 through August 2024 before initiating modest easing to 27.0% by November 2024.
The recovery's political-economic effect was insufficient to recover the credibility lost in 2022. The cumulative consumer-price increase across 2021–2024 of approximately 130% on the headline CPI was substantially unrecovered by nominal-wage adjustments; the post-2023 Coalition for Domestic Election Observers (CODEO) public-opinion surveys, the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) Afrobarometer rounds, and the parallel polling tracked cost-of-living as the dominant electoral issue through the 2024 cycle. The 7 December 2024 election (GH-E-01) produced the most decisive single-election repudiation of an incumbent governing party in Fourth-Republic history: John Dramani Mahama (NDC) defeated Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia (NPP) by 16.60 percentage points, with parallel parliamentary collapse from NPP-137 to NPP-88 seats in the 276-seat parliament.
The 7 January 2025 Mahama inauguration was the first non-consecutive presidential return in Ghanaian democratic history. Mahama, who had served from July 2012 to January 2017 and had lost the 2016 and 2020 elections to Akufo-Addo, returned to office with a parliamentary supermajority (NDC-183 of 276 seats) and inherited the ongoing IMF programme. The 11 March 2025 Budget Statement, delivered by Finance Minister Cassiel Ato Forson, signalled continuity-with-modification: the IMF programme was reaffirmed; the e-Levy, the COVID-Health-Recovery Levy, and the betting tax (Akufo-Addo-era domestic-revenue-mobilisation instruments) were repealed; a Women's Development Bank legislation was advanced; and selected social-spending floors were strengthened. The Fourth Review of the ECF (April 2025) concluded with a positive verdict and continued tranche disbursement.
The contested record on the 2022–2025 trajectory clusters around three durable accounts. First, the DDEP-design account: the Ministry-of-Finance/IMF position that the DDEP's structuring was the minimum restructuring necessary under the debt-sustainability framework and that the negotiated protections adequately addressed the distributional concerns. Second, the bondholder-and-pensioner-equity account: the Pensioners Association of Ghana / Individual Bondholders Forum / civil-society position that the DDEP constituted a constitutional breach of the implicit contract between the state and its retail creditors, that more-extensive protections should have been pursued, and that the financial-sector recapitalisation mechanism distributed costs regressively. Third, the post-2024 macro-inheritance account: the post-2024 NDC framing of the inheritance as a structurally damaged macroeconomic environment requiring further corrective action versus the post-2024 NPP framing of a substantially stabilised handover whose subsequent political-economic management belongs to the inheritor. Each account is identifiable with named partisans and each will be the subject of continuing post-2025 commentary.
The comparative-African and comparative-Global-South significance of the Ghana case is substantial. The Ghanaian DDEP was the first post-2010 case of a sub-Saharan African sovereign restructuring of locally-denominated debt at this scale; the bilateral-debt restructuring was the third G20 Common Framework case to reach completion, after Chad (2022) and Zambia (2023); the Eurobond Exchange was the third Eurobond restructuring of the post-2020 sub-Saharan African cluster (after Zambia 2024 and concurrent with Sri Lanka's parallel 2023–2024 trajectory). The cumulative case has been studied by the IMF, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Institute of International Finance as a reference architecture for subsequent restructurings; the durability of the post-2025 recovery, and the post-2025 political-economic absorption of the distributional incidence, will determine the long-run comparative-case verdict.

2. The Pre-Crisis Configuration (2017–2022)

2.1 The Post-HIPC Re-leveraging Trajectory

To understand the 2022 crisis, it is necessary to begin with the structural fiscal architecture inherited from the post-HIPC period. Ghana reached the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Completion Point in July 2004 under the Kufuor presidency (GH-C-01) and received cumulative debt cancellation through the HIPC Initiative and the parallel Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) of approximately USD 4.0 billion through 2006. The HIPC/MDRI period reset Ghana's external-debt-to-GDP ratio from levels above 100% in the late 1990s to below 30% by 2006 and established a fiscal-policy baseline of moderate borrowing within a debt-sustainability-conscious framework.

The post-2007 re-leveraging trajectory unwound that baseline progressively. The 2007 commercial-oil discovery in the Jubilee field (declared commercial in December 2007; first oil October 2010) altered the borrowing constraint: Ghana acquired investment-grade access to international commercial debt markets and issued its inaugural USD 750 million ten-year Eurobond on 4 October 2007 at a coupon of 8.50% — the first sub-Saharan African Eurobond by a non-South-African sovereign. Subsequent Eurobond issuances proceeded annually or near-annually from 2013 onward (the 2013 USD 750 million issuance; the 2014 USD 1 billion issuance; the 2015 USD 1 billion issuance; the 2016 USD 750 million issuance; the 2018 USD 2 billion issuance; the 2019 USD 3 billion issuance; the 2020 USD 3 billion issuance; the 2021 USD 3.025 billion issuance). The cumulative Eurobond stock by end-2021 was approximately USD 13.1 billion at a weighted-average coupon of approximately 7.8% with maturities spread across the period 2023–2061.

Domestic-debt accumulation paralleled the external trajectory. The Ghana Stock Exchange Fixed-Income Market — including Government of Ghana treasury bills, treasury notes (2-year, 3-year), and bonds (5-year, 6-year, 7-year, 10-year, 15-year, and 20-year tenors) — developed substantial depth through the 2010s. By December 2021, total domestic public debt stood at approximately ₵181 billion, equivalent to approximately USD 30 billion at the prevailing exchange rate; this was held across the categories of banks (approximately 32%), pension funds and Tier-2 SSNIT-administered funds (approximately 12%), insurance companies (approximately 6%), collective investment schemes (approximately 4%), individual investors (approximately 8%), the Bank of Ghana (approximately 30%), and other categories (approximately 8%).

The cumulative public debt position by end-2021 was therefore approximately USD 50.2 billion against a GDP of approximately USD 79 billion, producing a debt-to-GDP ratio of approximately 78–80% (the precise figure varied across measurement conventions). The IMF Article IV Consultation of 2021 had flagged the trajectory as "high risk of debt distress" — the highest risk classification on the IMF Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries — and had recommended fiscal-consolidation measures that the Akufo-Addo administration declined to adopt at the speed and scale recommended.

2.2 The 2017–2019 "Ghana Beyond Aid" Frame

The Akufo-Addo administration's signature macroeconomic-policy posture through 2017–2019 was framed by the "Ghana Beyond Aid" rhetoric (articulated in the Charter and Strategy Document, April 2019; see GH-D-03 for full treatment) and the parallel post-2015 IMF-programme-exit posture. Ghana had entered a three-year ECF programme with the IMF in April 2015 under the second Mahama administration (the programme that the post-2017 Akufo-Addo administration inherited and extended to April 2019). The exit from the programme in April 2019 was framed by the Akufo-Addo administration as a substantive macroeconomic-policy achievement and as the foundation for a post-IMF Ghanaian fiscal-policy trajectory.

The post-exit period through 2019 produced moderately positive macroeconomic indicators on multiple dimensions: GDP growth of approximately 6.5% (FY 2019); headline inflation in single digits for the first time in several years (7.9% in December 2019); a fiscal deficit of approximately 4.7% of GDP (FY 2019); a cedi that depreciated modestly (from ¢4.82/USD at end-2018 to ¢5.71/USD at end-2019). The 2019 fiscal position was substantially below the 2015 ECF baseline but had been achieved with material under-disclosure of selected expenditure commitments — particularly the energy-sector legacy debt and the financial-sector clean-up costs incurred between 2017 and 2019 — that subsequent IMF Article IV assessments would identify and quantify.

2.3 The COVID-19 Fiscal Shock (March 2020 – March 2022)

The COVID-19 pandemic fiscal response was the proximate accelerant of the post-2022 crisis. The FY 2020 budget had been calibrated to a fiscal deficit of approximately 4.7% of GDP; the cumulative pandemic-response expenditures (the Coronavirus Alleviation Programme launched April 2020; the free water and electricity provisions of April–December 2020; the GH₵19 billion Ghana CARES "Obaatan Pa" Programme launched November 2020; the COVID-19 vaccine procurement; the parallel revenue-side collapse from the global slowdown) produced a final FY 2020 fiscal deficit of 11.7% of GDP — the largest single-year fiscal expansion in post-1992 Ghanaian fiscal history.

The FY 2021 fiscal deficit, at approximately 9.7% of GDP, signalled that the FY 2020 expansion had not been a one-off shock but rather the new baseline. The FY 2022 budget, presented to Parliament in November 2021, had been calibrated to a 7.4%-of-GDP deficit on the assumption of accelerating domestic-revenue mobilisation through the proposed Electronic Transaction Levy (E-Levy) — a 1.75% levy on mobile-money transactions above ₵100 announced in the November 2021 Budget. The E-Levy debate dominated the first quarter of 2022 (the Minority NDC parliamentary walk-out; the Speaker Bagbin's procedural rulings; the eventual May 2022 passage at a reduced 1.5% rate after extended deliberation). The E-Levy revenue underperformed projections by a substantial margin through 2022; the cumulative revenue mobilisation shortfall — combined with the global commodity-price shock from the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine — produced a deteriorating fiscal trajectory through Q2 2022 that the markets read in real time.

2.4 The Russia–Ukraine 2022 Commodity Shock

The February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine produced a complex set of effects on the Ghanaian fiscal position. The proximate commodity-price effects were mixed: cocoa prices were modestly supported by a parallel global supply-demand recalibration; gold prices rose substantially (with positive implications for Ghana's gold-export revenues); but wheat prices and refined-petroleum prices rose sharply (Ghana is a net importer of both). The fiscal-balance effects, weighing the export-revenue gains against the import-cost increases, were broadly neutral to modestly negative for FY 2022.

The financial-channel effects were however materially negative. The post-March 2022 US Federal Reserve tightening cycle — the initial 25 basis-point increase of 16 March 2022, followed by 50 basis points in May 2022, 75 basis points in June 2022, and continuing increases through Q3 2022 — closed Eurobond market access for the entire sub-Saharan African sovereign cluster. Ghana's planned 2022 Eurobond issuance, which had been contemplated for Q1–Q2 2022 at projected coupons of approximately 8.5–9.0%, was abandoned in March 2022 as secondary-market spreads on Ghana's outstanding Eurobonds widened from approximately 600 basis points (late 2021) to approximately 1,400 basis points (mid-2022) and beyond. The closure of Eurobond access removed the principal source of external-debt-service financing on which the 2021 fiscal architecture had been built.

3. The Path to Debt-Service Suspension (March–November 2022)

3.1 The Cedi Collapse

The cedi-dollar exchange rate, which had stood at approximately ¢6.10/USD on the interbank market in January 2022, depreciated progressively through the year: to approximately ¢7.50/USD by April; to ¢8.50/USD by July; to ¢10.20/USD by September; to approximately ¢14.50/USD by mid-November 2022. The cumulative eleven-month depreciation of approximately 58% in nominal terms (and approximately 50% on a trade-weighted basis) was the largest single-year cedi depreciation since the 1983 PNDC-era devaluation that had inaugurated the Economic Recovery Programme (see GH-B-01).

The depreciation was both a cause and a consequence of the deteriorating fiscal position. As the cedi depreciated, the cedi-equivalent cost of external-debt service rose proportionally; as external-debt-service requirements rose, the Bank of Ghana's foreign-exchange-reserve depletion accelerated; as reserves depleted, market confidence in the cedi-dollar peg deteriorated further. The self-reinforcing dynamics through Q2–Q3 2022 produced a series of Bank of Ghana interventions — including substantial Monetary Policy Rate increases (from 14.5% in January 2022 to 19.0% in March 2022, 22.0% in August 2022, 24.5% in October 2022, and 27.0% in November 2022) — that succeeded in containing inflation-expectations only partially.

3.2 The Reserves Trajectory

Bank of Ghana gross international reserves had stood at approximately USD 9.7 billion at end-2021 (equivalent to approximately 4.4 months of import cover). The cumulative drawdown through 2022 was severe: to approximately USD 7.3 billion by end-March 2022; to approximately USD 5.9 billion by end-June 2022; to approximately USD 4.5 billion by end-September 2022; and to approximately USD 2.7 billion by end-November 2022 (equivalent to approximately 1.1 months of import cover). The net international reserves position (gross reserves minus encumbrances and short-term liabilities) was substantially lower — by some accounts approximating zero by Q3 2022 [TBD-VERIFY: the precise net-reserves trajectory across Q3 2022 was the subject of contested commentary, with the Akufo-Addo administration's published gross-reserves figures diverging from IMF and World Bank assessments of the net position].

The reserves trajectory was the binding constraint on policy. By mid-2022, Bank of Ghana foreign-exchange-market interventions to stabilise the cedi had become unsustainable on the prevailing reserves base; the alternative of allowing the cedi to depreciate further without intervention would have produced still more rapid inflation pass-through and would have rendered external-debt service materially insolvent. The combination — unsustainable intervention, intolerable non-intervention — was the proximate fiscal-policy bind that produced the formal IMF request.

3.3 The 1 July 2022 IMF Request

President Akufo-Addo's address to the nation on 30 June 2022 — followed by the Ministry of Finance announcement on 1 July 2022 that Ghana would formally engage the IMF for a programme — was the formal reversal of the pre-2022 "no-IMF" position. The 30 June 2022 address acknowledged "the impact of COVID-19, the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, and other global factors" and announced that "Cabinet has approved engagement with the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral institutions". The reversal was politically consequential: the post-2017 "Ghana Beyond Aid" rhetoric had positioned IMF engagement as the explicit antithesis of Akufo-Addo-era macroeconomic policy. The 1 July 2022 announcement was treated by the financial press as a confession of policy failure; by the political opposition as vindication; and by the IMF as the basis for accelerated staff-level engagement.

The Article IV Consultation that had been pending was conducted in parallel with the programme negotiations through July–November 2022. The IMF staff team — led by Stéphane Roudet through the negotiation period — produced a debt-sustainability assessment that concluded debt was unsustainable and that a Fund-supported programme would require both domestic and external debt restructuring as preconditions for any IMF financing. The conclusion — that debt-restructuring was a programme precondition rather than a programme outcome — was the structural determinant of the subsequent DDEP-and-Eurobond-restructuring sequence.

3.4 The November 2022 Staff-Level Agreement and the December 2022 Announcements

The IMF Staff-Level Agreement was announced on 12 December 2022 — the third Tuesday following the 5 December 2022 DDEP launch — confirming agreement on the broad parameters of a 36-month USD 3 billion ECF programme. The Staff-Level Agreement followed a sequence of December 2022 government announcements: the 5 December DDEP launch (Section 4); the 19 December suspension of debt-service on selected external-commercial debt (the formal default announcement); and the parallel domestic-policy announcements including selected fiscal-tightening measures. The Staff-Level Agreement also formalised the comparability-of-treatment requirement: that domestic and external creditors would be required to deliver broadly proportional contributions to the debt-stock reduction, with the precise calibration to be determined through the programme negotiation.

The December 2022 announcements were therefore a tightly interlocking package: the DDEP launch was the domestic side of the debt-restructuring; the 19 December debt-service suspension was the external side; the 12 December Staff-Level Agreement was the IMF programme framework; and the 17 May 2023 IMF Board Approval would close the package after the DDEP settlement had been achieved. The five-month interval between the December 2022 announcements and the May 2023 Board Approval was substantially occupied by the DDEP negotiation (Section 5) and by the parallel preparation of the IMF programme documentation.

4. The Domestic Debt Exchange Programme — Design and Launch

4.1 The 5 December 2022 Ofori-Atta Press Conference

The DDEP was launched on Monday 5 December 2022 at a Ministry of Finance press conference in Accra at which Minister of Finance Ken Ofori-Atta — accompanied by Bank of Ghana Governor Dr Ernest Addison and Deputy Minister of Finance John Kumah — presented the Programme Memorandum to the financial-sector press. The press conference, broadcast live by Joy News and Citi News, was the first public articulation of the DDEP's terms; the Programme Memorandum was published simultaneously on the Ministry of Finance website. The press-conference setting and timing — a Monday-morning launch following the conclusion of the parliamentary FY 2023 Budget debate the preceding week — were calibrated to position the DDEP as a Budget-adjacent fiscal-policy measure rather than as an extraordinary emergency intervention.

Ofori-Atta's prepared remarks framed the DDEP as a necessary contribution to the debt-restructuring required under the prospective IMF programme. The remarks emphasised the cumulative cost of inaction (an estimated annual debt-service obligation in 2023 of approximately ₵60 billion against projected total revenue of approximately ₵100 billion); the structuring choice to avoid nominal-principal haircut on eligible bonds in favour of coupon compression and tenor extension; and the exemption of Bank of Ghana holdings (which the Memorandum specified would be addressed through a separate Bank of Ghana balance-sheet arrangement). The remarks did not, in the 5 December presentation, include any individual-bondholder exemption; this was the proximate cause of the immediate civil-society and bondholder response (Section 5).

4.2 The Original DDEP Terms

The 5 December 2022 Programme Memorandum specified the following original terms for eligible bondholders:

Eligible Securities: All Government of Ghana cedi-denominated bonds (notes and bonds, excluding treasury bills under 365 days), with the exception of bonds held by the Bank of Ghana, which would be addressed through a separate arrangement. Total eligible amount: approximately ₵137 billion of nominal principal across all categories.
Exchange Menu: Twelve new bonds were offered in exchange, with maturities running from 2027 through 2038. The coupon structure was zero through FY 2023; rising to approximately 5% in 2024–2025; rising to approximately 8.5–10% by 2026–2028.
No Nominal Principal Haircut: The exchange preserved the full nominal-principal value of the eligible bonds (₵1 of old bond for ₵1 of new bond in aggregate nominal value), with the present-value loss arising entirely from coupon compression and tenor extension.
Tax Treatment: Coupon income on the new bonds was specified to be exempt from income tax (a protection for bondholders).
Settlement: The original settlement date was 19 December 2022 (subsequently extended).
Exemptions: Bank of Ghana holdings were exempted (to be addressed separately); no individual-bondholder exemption was specified in the original Memorandum.

The estimated present-value haircut under the original terms, calculated at the prevailing market yield curve, was approximately 30–40% — varying by bondholder category and by the precise calibration of the exchange menu accepted.

4.3 The Structural Decision: Domestic Before External

A central structural feature of the post-November 2022 restructuring architecture was the sequencing of domestic restructuring before external restructuring. The choice was substantially conditioned by the IMF's debt-sustainability framework and by the political-economy considerations of the comparability-of-treatment requirement.

The IMF framework required a debt-stock reduction sufficient to bring present-value-of-debt-to-GDP to a "moderate risk" threshold by 2028. Within that framework, the calibration of the domestic-and-external contribution was a policy choice. The Ministry-of-Finance/IMF rationale for the domestic-first sequencing rested on three considerations: (a) the domestic-debt stock was approximately twice the external-commercial stock by nominal value, so a domestic-only contribution could not by itself produce sufficient debt-stock reduction, but a domestic contribution had to be substantial enough to justify the parallel external contribution; (b) the domestic restructuring could be executed administratively under domestic-law instruments without the multi-party negotiation procedures required for external commercial-debt; (c) the comparability-of-treatment requirement — that external creditors would not accept restructuring on terms substantially more onerous than those applied to domestic creditors — required that domestic restructuring be specified before external negotiations could proceed in detail.

The political-economic implications of the sequencing were substantial. The domestic-first approach placed the initial restructuring burden on Ghanaian institutional and retail creditors before the external commercial creditors had committed to comparable contributions. The Pensioners Association critique (Section 5) was substantially structured around this sequencing: that pensioners, retail savers, and the cumulative domestic-economy intermediation chain had been required to absorb losses before any commitment from external bondholders had been secured.

4.4 The IMF Debt-Sustainability Framework as Structural Determinant

The IMF Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries (LIC-DSF), applied to Ghana in late 2022 and through the programme period, was the structural determinant of the DDEP's calibration. The LIC-DSF assesses debt sustainability against four thresholds for present-value-of-external-debt-to-GDP, present-value-of-external-debt-to-exports, debt-service-to-exports, and debt-service-to-revenue; the assessment also considers total-public-debt-to-GDP for sovereigns with material domestic debt.

The November 2022 LIC-DSF assessment for Ghana classified the country in "in debt distress" — the highest distress classification. The programme negotiation required a debt-restructuring outcome that would move Ghana to "moderate risk of debt distress" by 2028 — a substantial step down. The required debt-stock reduction was calibrated by IMF staff at a present-value haircut of approximately 30–35% on the combined domestic-and-external debt stock, with the precise calibration to be distributed across domestic, bilateral, and commercial-external creditors under the comparability-of-treatment principle.

The DDEP's original-terms calibration was anchored to this overall framework. The post-5-December 2022 negotiation (Section 5) produced material modifications to the distribution of the burden across domestic-bondholder categories but did not significantly alter the aggregate domestic contribution; the aggregate calibration was structural to the IMF framework rather than to the domestic political negotiation.

5. The Bondholder-and-Pensioner Equity Tensions (December 2022 – February 2023)

5.1 The Pensioners Association of Ghana Mobilisation

The Pensioners Association of Ghana (PAG), led by its national chairman Dr Adu Anane Antwi (a former Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission), was the first major civil-society organisation to mobilise against the DDEP. The PAG's grievance was structural: pensioners had been encouraged across the post-2010 period to allocate retirement savings into Government of Ghana bonds on the implicit understanding that sovereign cedi-denominated debt was risk-free; the 5 December DDEP terms would impose substantial present-value losses on these holdings, materially compressing retirement-income streams for individuals who had no remaining earning capacity.

The PAG's response began with a formal letter to the President dated 12 December 2022 requesting a meeting and explicitly opposing the inclusion of individual pensioner holdings in the DDEP. When the response from the Office of the President did not reverse the policy, the PAG announced a picket of the Ministry of Finance scheduled for 26–27 December 2022 — the post-Christmas period chosen to maximise media salience over a politically quiet weekend.

The 27 December 2022 picket — conducted at the Ministry of Finance gates on Independence Avenue with hundreds of pensioners present, many in their seventies and eighties, holding placards reading "We have worked all our lives — do not steal our pensions" — was extensively covered by Joy News, Citi News, GhanaWeb, MyJoyOnline, and the Daily Graphic. The visual impact of elderly pensioners protesting outside the Ministry of Finance through the Christmas-New Year holiday period was politically consequential: it crystallised the distributional incidence of the DDEP in human terms and made the abstract concept of "domestic debt restructuring" concrete in the public consciousness.

The PAG sustained pressure through late December 2022 and January 2023: a second picket on 9 January 2023; a parallel petition to Parliament's Finance Committee; engagement with the Christian Council of Ghana, the Trades Union Congress, and the National Catholic Secretariat to broaden the coalition. The cumulative pressure produced the first material government concession: on 12 January 2023, Ofori-Atta announced that individuals over 59 years of age would be exempt from the DDEP, with their existing bonds preserved on original terms.

5.2 The Individual Bondholders Forum

In parallel with the PAG mobilisation, the Ghana Individual Bondholders Forum (GIBF) — a loose coalition that coalesced in late December 2022 under the convenership of Senyo Hosi (a financial-sector commentator) and Yaw Akoto (a pensioner activist) — mobilised the broader retail-bondholder constituency. The GIBF's principal argument was that individual bondholders constituted a relatively small proportion of the total DDEP-eligible stock (approximately 8% by some estimates) but bore a disproportionate distributional cost relative to their political-economic capacity to absorb losses.

The GIBF organised three principal forms of pressure through late December 2022 and January 2023: (a) public mobilisation through press conferences, town-hall meetings in Accra and Kumasi, and sustained social-media engagement; (b) legal action — specifically, a writ filed at the Supreme Court of Ghana arguing that the DDEP, as applied to individual bondholders, constituted a violation of Articles 18(2) (protection of property) and 20 (compulsory acquisition of property) of the 1992 Constitution; (c) engagement with the Bondholder Steering Committee (the parallel external-Eurobond mechanism, then being formed) to argue that comparability-of-treatment should mean that retail individual bondholders should be exempted as the external commercial-creditor side did not include a comparable retail-investor category.

The GIBF's legal action — In re DDEP: Individual Bondholders Forum & Others v. Attorney-General — was filed in mid-January 2023 [TBD-VERIFY: the precise procedural status of the GIBF Supreme Court action through 2023 and whether it was withdrawn following the Amended and Restated Offer, settled, or dismissed on procedural grounds]. The litigation provided procedural pressure on the government even as the constitutional question — whether sovereign-debt-restructuring qualifies as compulsory acquisition of property under Article 20 — was not definitively resolved.

5.3 The Financial-Institutions Response

The institutional financial-sector response — from banks, insurance companies, pension-fund administrators (Tier-2 SSNIT-administered funds and Tier-3 private-pension-fund administrators), and collective investment schemes — was conducted through different channels. The Ghana Association of Bankers, led through the period by Mansa Nettey (Chief Executive of Standard Chartered Bank Ghana and Association President), engaged directly with the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Ghana on the financial-stability implications of the original terms.

The institutional concern was twofold. First, the immediate balance-sheet shock: the present-value mark-to-market loss on banks' Government of Ghana bond holdings, under the original 5 December terms, would have rendered several second-tier and third-tier banks technically insolvent on a Basel-III capital-adequacy basis. Second, the systemic-stability implications: a cascading bank-failure scenario in early 2023 would have produced parallel pressures on insurance companies, pension funds, and collective investment schemes whose own balance-sheets relied on banking-sector intermediation.

The institutional response produced two structural modifications. First, the 17 December 2022 Bank of Ghana announcement of regulatory forbearance — specifically, the recognition that DDEP-related losses would not trigger immediate capital-adequacy regulatory action, with a four-year transitional period to amortise the impact. Second, the parallel announcement of the Ghana Financial Stability Fund (Section 6) — the specific mechanism through which the systemic-stability cost would be backstopped by government and donor financing.

5.4 The 31 January 2023 Amended and Restated Offer

The cumulative pressure from the PAG, the GIBF, the financial-institutions cluster, and the parallel Bank-of-Ghana regulatory-forbearance announcement produced the 31 January 2023 Amended and Restated Offer. The Amended Offer modified the original 5 December terms in several material respects:

Individual Bondholder Exemption: Individuals (natural persons, holding bonds in personal capacity) with aggregate bond holdings below ₵25,000 were exempted from the Programme. The threshold was subsequently reviewed; the Amended Offer's exemption applied to approximately [TBD-VERIFY: estimates of the proportion of individual bondholders covered by the threshold exemption ranged from 70% to 85% of the individual-bondholder count, with substantial uncertainty in the underlying registry data] of individual bondholders.
Pensioner Exemption (Above-59 Provision): Individuals over the age of 59 were exempted entirely from the Programme, regardless of holdings size. This was the principal PAG-secured concession.
Pension-Fund Modified Terms: Tier-2 (SSNIT-administered) and Tier-3 (private) pension funds were offered a modified set of new bonds with reduced coupon compression and shorter tenor extensions, producing a present-value haircut of approximately 18–22% (against the approximately 35% on the standard offer).
Coupon Step-Up: The coupon structure on the standard new bonds was modified to introduce a step-up: coupons of approximately 5% in 2024–2025 (against 0% in the original), rising to 8.5–10% by 2026.
Cash-Coupon and PIK-Coupon Distinction: The 2023 coupon (originally zero) was modified to include a small cash component, with the residual structured as payment-in-kind (PIK) — providing partial cash flow to bondholders in 2023.
Settlement Extension: The settlement date was extended from December 2022 to mid-February 2023 to accommodate the negotiation timeline.

5.5 The 14 February 2023 Final Settlement

The DDEP closed on 14 February 2023 with the Ministry of Finance announcing approximately 85% participation among eligible bondholders. The settlement produced new bonds issued under the Amended and Restated terms; the un-tendered bonds remained outstanding on original terms with limited servicing.

The 85% participation rate was below the original Ministry-of-Finance target of approximately 90% but above the implicit IMF threshold (estimated at approximately 80%) for programme viability. The participation rate varied substantially across bondholder categories: banks (approximately 92%); pension funds (approximately 75% on modified terms); insurance companies (approximately 88%); individuals not exempted (approximately 65%); collective investment schemes (approximately 80%). The cumulative debt-service-savings stream from the Programme — calculated by the Ministry of Finance at approximately ₵61 billion through 2024–2027 — was sufficient for the IMF debt-sustainability framework requirements.

The political-rhetorical settlement was, however, only partial. The Pensioners Association, the Individual Bondholders Forum, and selected aligned civil-society organisations continued through 2023–2024 to engage the post-DDEP distributional questions; the question of whether bondholders exempted from the DDEP (the under-59 individuals below the threshold) would receive original coupon payments in full was the subject of continuing engagement; the question of whether the Bank of Ghana would itself accept any contribution (it ultimately accepted a separate balance-sheet arrangement; see Section 6) remained politically rhetorical.

6. The Financial-Sector Recapitalisation and the Ghana Financial Stability Fund

6.1 The Post-DDEP Balance-Sheet Shock

The DDEP's immediate balance-sheet effect on the Ghanaian financial sector was substantial. The Bank of Ghana's Financial Stability Review (March 2023) and the subsequent Banking Sector Report (June 2023) quantified the post-DDEP impairment across the banking sector: cumulative bond-portfolio mark-to-market losses of approximately ₵18 billion across the 23 universal banks; selected bank-level losses exceeding regulatory capital; aggregate capital-adequacy-ratio compression from a system average of 19.6% (December 2022) to a transition-adjusted estimate of approximately 12.5% (March 2023, with regulatory forbearance applied).

The non-bank financial institution (NBFI) impact was equally substantial. Pension-fund administrators reported aggregate Tier-2 and Tier-3 fund losses on a mark-to-market basis of approximately ₵8 billion; insurance companies reported approximately ₵2.5 billion; collective investment schemes reported approximately ₵3 billion. The aggregate financial-sector impact, including bank and NBFI categories, was approximately ₵32 billion — equivalent to approximately 23% of the total DDEP-eligible stock.

6.2 The Ghana Financial Stability Fund Framework

The Ghana Financial Stability Fund (GFSF), established by the Government of Ghana in coordination with the World Bank and the IMF in mid-2023, was the principal vehicle for addressing the financial-sector recapitalisation cost. The Fund was established with an initial capital structure of approximately USD 1.5 billion: USD 750 million from the International Development Association (IDA) through a Development Policy Operation; approximately USD 500 million from the Government of Ghana fiscal allocation; and approximately USD 250 million from selected bilateral partners and the African Development Bank.

The GFSF's operational architecture included three principal modalities: (a) Solvency Support — direct capital injections into universal banks whose capital-adequacy ratio fell below the regulatory minimum after DDEP impairment, structured as preference shares with a five-year redemption profile; (b) Liquidity Support — short-term liquidity facilities to banks experiencing deposit-withdrawal pressure during the DDEP transition, structured as repurchase agreements against eligible collateral; (c) NBFI Support — targeted support to pension funds, insurance companies, and selected collective investment schemes through balance-sheet arrangements tailored to each sector's regulatory framework.

Through 2023–2024, the GFSF disbursed approximately USD 1.0 billion in solvency support across [TBD-VERIFY: the precise number of bank recipients of GFSF solvency support, and the disclosure status of recipient-bank identities, has been the subject of partial disclosure with material information remaining undisclosed for confidentiality reasons]. The post-2024 NBFI engagement has been more limited, with most pension and insurance recapitalisations conducted through balance-sheet arrangements rather than direct capital support.

6.3 The Bank of Ghana Balance-Sheet Arrangement

The Bank of Ghana's holdings of Government of Ghana bonds — approximately ₵55 billion at end-2022 — had been excluded from the DDEP on the structural principle that central-bank balance-sheet restructuring should be conducted through a separate arrangement. The post-DDEP arrangement, announced in mid-2023 and operationalised through a Memorandum of Understanding between the Bank and the Ministry of Finance, included three principal elements: (a) the conversion of approximately ₵50 billion of Bank-of-Ghana-held bonds into a long-dated, low-coupon non-marketable instrument with terms broadly comparable to the DDEP standard offer; (b) the recognition of the Bank's resulting loss as a negative equity position on the Bank's balance sheet, to be amortised through retained earnings over a multi-year period; (c) commitment by the Government to a path of fiscal-cessation of monetary financing — specifically, the cessation of new advances from the Bank to the Government — that was subsequently embodied in the IMF programme conditionality.

The Bank of Ghana's reported FY 2023 negative-equity position of approximately ₵60 billion was the proximate accounting outcome of this arrangement. The post-2023 commentary on the Bank's balance-sheet position — including the Imani Centre for Policy and Education's Bank of Ghana Negative Equity Analysis (2023, 2024), and parallel academic engagement — has emphasised the unusual nature of the position and its implications for monetary-policy credibility.

6.4 The Rationalisation of Non-Bank Financial Institutions

A parallel post-DDEP development was the rationalisation of selected non-bank financial institutions whose business models had relied on Government of Ghana bond intermediation. The 2017–2019 financial-sector clean-up under the Akufo-Addo administration (the closure of nine banks during 2017–2018; the parallel closure of selected savings-and-loans companies and microfinance institutions) had already produced a leaner banking sector by end-2019. The post-2022 trajectory produced further rationalisation, particularly in the savings-and-loans and microfinance segments where bond-portfolio impairment had pushed selected institutions below sustainability thresholds.

The Bank of Ghana's Financial Stability Review (multiple editions, 2023–2025) has documented the cumulative post-2022 sector rationalisation: the closure of [TBD-VERIFY: precise count of post-DDEP NBFI closures and the cumulative depositor-protection costs]; the consolidation of selected institutions; the parallel regulatory tightening on bond-portfolio concentration risk in NBFI prudential frameworks.

7. The 17 May 2023 IMF Extended Credit Facility

7.1 The Board Approval and the Programme Architecture

The IMF Executive Board approved the 36-month USD 3 billion Extended Credit Facility arrangement for Ghana on 17 May 2023 at a Board meeting in Washington DC. The Board's approval followed the December 2022 Staff-Level Agreement; the seventy-day post-DDEP-settlement preparation period; the IMF Management's Letter of Assessment confirming that Ghana had met the prior actions including DDEP completion; and the parallel consultations with the Government and the Bank of Ghana.

The first tranche of approximately USD 600 million (450 million Special Drawing Rights) was disbursed to the Government of Ghana through the Bank of Ghana on 19 May 2023, two business days after Board approval. The disbursement profile across the 36-month programme period had been calibrated to support seven subsequent semi-annual reviews; the cumulative scheduled disbursement under the original programme was approximately USD 3 billion across the programme period.

The programme architecture was structured around three principal pillars, each with associated quantitative performance criteria, structural benchmarks, and indicative targets:

7.2 Pillar 1 — Fiscal Consolidation

The fiscal-consolidation pillar required Ghana to achieve a primary fiscal surplus of 1.5% of GDP by 2028, with a transition path running through the programme period. The principal quantitative performance criteria included:

Primary balance commitment to a 0.5% of GDP surplus for FY 2024 (the first primary surplus since 2014); rising to 1.0% for FY 2025 and 1.5% for FY 2026.
A ceiling on the non-financial public-sector borrowing requirement, calibrated quarterly.
Net international reserves accumulation targets, calibrated quarterly with end-period floors.
A ceiling on net domestic-financing of the central government deficit by the Bank of Ghana (the specific instrument of the "zero monetary financing" commitment).
A ceiling on non-concessional external borrowing.
A floor on the social-spending allocation, calibrated to protect expenditure on the National Health Insurance Scheme, the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme, the Free Senior High School programme, the School Feeding Programme, and other identified pro-poor expenditures.

The fiscal-consolidation calibration was supported by structural benchmarks including: the elimination of the unfunded mandate of selected statutory funds; the rationalisation of the Public Finance Management Act framework; the parallel implementation of the Energy Sector Recovery Programme to address the legacy energy-sector debt.

7.3 Pillar 2 — Structural Reform and Revenue Mobilisation

The structural-reform pillar emphasised domestic-revenue mobilisation. The principal commitments included:

The reform of the Value Added Tax (VAT) structure, including the partial integration of the National Health Insurance Levy and the GETFund Levy into the VAT base (implemented through the 2023 and 2024 Budget cycles).
The reform of the property-tax architecture, including the modernisation of the property-rate framework administered by Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies.
The reform of the tax-incentive framework, including the rationalisation of selected investment-incentive provisions.
The reform of the Ghana Revenue Authority's institutional architecture, including the digitalisation of tax administration through the GRA's E-VAT and parallel platforms.
The reform of the public-sector wage-bill architecture, including the modernisation of the Single Spine Salary Structure.

The cumulative revenue-mobilisation target under the programme was to raise the tax-revenue-to-GDP ratio from approximately 12.5% (FY 2022) to approximately 17–18% by FY 2028 — a substantial expansion within the programme horizon. The post-2023 progress on this target has been mixed: the FY 2023 outturn was approximately 13.5%; the FY 2024 outturn approximately 14.5%; the FY 2025 projection approximately 15.5%. The cumulative trajectory has been below the IMF's projected path, with the gap addressed in successive Programme reviews through compensating measures.

7.4 Pillar 3 — Monetary and Exchange-Rate Framework

The monetary-and-exchange-rate pillar required Ghana to operationalise the post-2022 inflation-targeting regime under a managed-floating exchange-rate framework. The principal commitments included:

The cessation of monetary financing of the central-government deficit by the Bank of Ghana (the "zero monetary financing" commitment).
The implementation of an effective inflation-targeting framework with a medium-term inflation target of 8% ±2%.
The maintenance of a market-determined exchange rate, with foreign-exchange-market interventions limited to smoothing of excessive volatility rather than defence of a specific rate.
The reform of the Bank of Ghana's balance-sheet position, including the post-DDEP arrangement (Section 6.3).
The strengthening of foreign-exchange-reserve management, including reserve-adequacy targets calibrated against ARA-EM (Assessing Reserve Adequacy for Emerging Markets) thresholds.

The post-2023 implementation of the monetary-policy framework was substantially achieved: the Policy Rate path through 2023–2024 (the peak of 30.0% from March 2023 through August 2024; the modest easing to 27.0% by November 2024) demonstrated commitment to the disinflation trajectory; the foreign-exchange-market intervention restraint allowed the cedi to find a market-clearing level in the ¢14–¢15.5/USD range; the reserve-accumulation trajectory (Section 10) exceeded the programme schedule.

A specific feature of the programme architecture was the social-spending floor — a quantitative target on the level of expenditure on identified pro-poor programmes, calibrated to protect these expenditures from the broader fiscal-consolidation requirement. The protected categories included: the National Health Insurance Scheme; the Capitation Grant and the Free Senior High School programme (the latter the Akufo-Addo signature first-term policy); the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) cash-transfer programme; the School Feeding Programme; the Capitation Grant for basic schools; the National Youth Employment Programme; selected other categories.

The social-spending floor was an explicit recognition that fiscal consolidation in the post-2022 period would impose substantial distributional costs and that the protection of specific pro-poor expenditures was both an equity requirement and a political-economy precondition for sustained programme implementation. The cumulative social-spending performance through 2023–2025 has generally met or exceeded the floor, though the implementation has been the subject of selected civil-society commentary on the adequacy of the floor's calibration relative to the broader macroeconomic adjustment.

8. The External Debt Restructuring — G20 Common Framework

8.1 The June 2023 Formation of the Official Creditor Committee

The G20 Common Framework for Debt Treatment Beyond the DSSI — established by the G20 in November 2020 — provided the procedural architecture for the bilateral component of Ghana's external-debt restructuring. The Framework had been designed as a successor to the Paris Club's traditional bilateral-restructuring mechanism for low-income countries, with explicit incorporation of China and other major non-Paris-Club bilateral creditors. Prior to Ghana, the Framework had been applied to Chad (which reached a final agreement in November 2022) and Zambia (which reached a final agreement in June 2023).

Ghana's Common Framework application was formally submitted in January 2023, following the December 2022 debt-service suspension and in parallel with the prospective IMF programme negotiation. The Framework's procedural sequence required the formation of an Official Creditor Committee (OCC) comprising the Paris Club and non-Paris-Club bilateral creditors with material exposure. The Ghana OCC was formed in May 2023 and held its inaugural meeting in June 2023; the Committee was co-chaired by China (represented by the Export-Import Bank of China) and France (representing the Paris Club secretariat).

The composition of the Ghana OCC included Paris Club members (France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and others) and non-Paris-Club bilateral creditors (China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and others). The aggregate bilateral debt covered by the OCC was approximately USD 5.4 billion at end-2022 — a smaller share of total external debt than in many other Common Framework cases, reflecting the substantial role of commercial Eurobonds in Ghana's external-debt structure.

8.2 The 12 January 2024 Preliminary Memorandum of Understanding

The negotiation period from June 2023 through January 2024 was occupied by the data-sharing phase (in which Ghana and the OCC reconciled the precise bilateral-debt stock and service profile), the parameter-negotiation phase (in which the Common-Framework restructuring parameters were determined), and the drafting phase. The principal substantive issues included: the calibration of the present-value haircut required to meet the IMF DSA threshold; the allocation of the haircut across tenor extension, coupon reduction, and (limited) principal reduction; the implementation of the comparability-of-treatment principle relative to the prospective Eurobond restructuring.

The 12 January 2024 preliminary MoU, announced jointly by the Ministry of Finance and the OCC co-chairs, confirmed agreement on the parameters: a tenor extension of approximately 12 years on the bilateral debt; reduced interest rates of approximately 2.0–3.0% (down from weighted-average prevailing rates of approximately 5.0–6.0%); and a limited principal reduction. The estimated present-value haircut was approximately 35–40% on the bilateral-debt stock — broadly comparable to the parallel domestic-DDEP haircut and providing the comparability-of-treatment benchmark for the subsequent Eurobond negotiation.

8.3 The 11 June 2024 Final Agreement

The final agreement, signed on 11 June 2024 at a Ministry of Finance ceremony in Accra attended by the OCC representatives, gave legal force to the January MoU terms. The agreement covered approximately USD 5.4 billion of bilateral debt with the specific bilateral-creditor agreements to be implemented through separate bilateral instruments executed over the subsequent months.

The signing ceremony was attended by Mohammed Amin Adam (who had succeeded Ofori-Atta as Finance Minister in February 2024), representatives of the Export-Import Bank of China, the French Treasury (representing the Paris Club secretariat), and other OCC members. The post-signing remarks emphasised the comparability-of-treatment requirement and signalled the imminent commencement of detailed Eurobond negotiations on parallel terms (Section 9).

8.4 The Comparative-Case Significance

Ghana was the third case to reach a final agreement under the G20 Common Framework, after Chad (November 2022; specific bilateral creditor composition included China and Glencore) and Zambia (June 2023; specific bilateral creditor composition centred on China). The Ghana case differed from the Zambia case in three respects: (a) the bilateral-debt share of total external debt was smaller in Ghana (approximately 29% versus approximately 45% in Zambia), so the Common Framework's role in the overall restructuring was more circumscribed; (b) the negotiation period from application to MoU was shorter in Ghana (twelve months) than in Zambia (twenty-one months), demonstrating modest procedural acceleration; (c) the role of China as co-chair was operationalised differently — Ghana's negotiation produced a more rapidly converging position than Zambia's earlier negotiation, where the China–Paris Club coordination challenges had been more publicly contested.

The Common Framework's procedural-architecture has been the subject of substantial international-financial-policy commentary across the post-2020 period. The cumulative Ghana–Zambia–Chad–Ethiopia (the latter in pending status as of mid-2025) cluster has been read as a maturation of the Framework, though significant procedural-and-institutional challenges remain — particularly in the speed of negotiation, the transparency of process, and the coordination between China and traditional Paris Club creditors. Ghana's case has been cited by Carlos Lopes and others as evidence of partial improvement in the Framework's operational architecture, though the speed-of-negotiation question remains contested.

9. The Eurobond Exchange (October–November 2024)

9.1 The Bondholder Steering Committee and the 2023–2024 Negotiations

The Eurobond restructuring was conducted with a Bondholder Steering Committee (BSC) formed in early 2023. The Committee, chaired through the negotiation period by representatives of major asset managers with significant Ghana exposure including BlackRock, Amundi, Greylock Capital Management, and others [TBD-VERIFY: the precise membership of the BSC and the specific lead-firm role through the negotiation period — the BSC's public disclosures identified principal members but did not always specify role distribution]. The BSC engaged the Ministry of Finance through financial advisers (Lazard for the Government of Ghana; Rothschild & Co for the BSC) and legal counsel (Hogan Lovells for the Government; White & Case for the BSC).

The negotiation period through 2023 was structurally constrained by two parallel requirements. First, the Common Framework bilateral negotiation needed to reach sufficient maturity to establish the comparability-of-treatment benchmark — which it did with the 12 January 2024 MoU. Second, the IMF programme's debt-sustainability framework needed to be operationalised to determine the precise debt-stock reduction required from the Eurobond cohort. The combination meant that detailed Eurobond negotiations could not proceed in substantive form until early 2024.

The first major announcement came on 1 April 2024 when the Ministry of Finance announced an "agreement in principle" with the BSC on the broad parameters of the restructuring. The April announcement included indicative terms: a present-value haircut of approximately 33–37%; new instruments at coupons ranging from approximately 5.0% to 6.4%; tenor extensions to 2030 and beyond; and a partial principal reduction component of approximately 37% of the original principal stock (with the precise calibration to be determined through subsequent legal documentation).

9.2 The 3 October 2024 Exchange Offer Launch

The formal Exchange Offer Memorandum was launched on 3 October 2024 — the launch timing calibrated to allow completion of the Exchange before the 7 December 2024 election. The Memorandum was published simultaneously in Accra and through SEC and London Stock Exchange filings; the Offer was open for acceptance through 30 October 2024, with the settlement scheduled for 7 November 2024.

The Offer terms included the following:

Eligible Securities: Approximately USD 13.1 billion of Eurobond principal (covering Ghana's outstanding Eurobonds across the 2023–2061 maturity spectrum that had been subject to the December 2022 debt-service suspension).
Exchange Menu: Two new instrument options offered to eligible bondholders:
Disco Bond (Discount Bond): Approximately 37% principal haircut; new principal at 63% of original; coupon of 5.0% (cash); tenors of 2026, 2029, 2035.
Par Bond: No principal haircut; coupon of 1.5% rising via step-up to 6.0%; longer tenors to 2037–2045.
Cumulative Present-Value Haircut: Estimated at approximately 37% across the menu, with variation by selection (the Disco Bond option produced a slightly higher PV haircut than the Par Bond option, but the haircut convergence across the menu was the design objective).
Past-Due Interest Treatment: Past-due interest accrued between the December 2022 default and the November 2024 settlement was addressed through a separate "PDI Bond" with specific repayment terms.
Comparability-of-Treatment Certification: The Offer included a formal certification of comparability with the Common Framework bilateral agreement, supporting the legal architecture of the cross-creditor framework.

9.3 The 6 November 2024 Settlement

The Exchange Offer closed on 30 October 2024 with results announced on 6 November 2024. The participation rate was approximately 95% of eligible Eurobond principal — exceeding the 85% threshold set in the Offer Memorandum below which the Government had reserved the right to withdraw. The settlement was executed on 7 November 2024 with new instruments issued through ICSDs (Euroclear, Clearstream) and the Bank of Ghana acting as the cedi-side facilitating institution.

The settlement was thus completed on 7 November 2024 — exactly thirty days before the 7 December 2024 election. The political-economy of the timing has been contested in subsequent commentary: the Akufo-Addo administration's position was that the Exchange completion before the election demonstrated the credibility of the broader economic-recovery trajectory and provided assurance to the markets; critical commentary has argued that the timing was substantially political and that an alternative trajectory (slower negotiation; settlement after the election under whichever administration emerged victorious) would have produced different distributional outcomes.

The new instruments issued in November 2024 — the Disco Bonds (2026, 2029, 2035 tenors at 5.0% cash coupons), the Par Bonds (2037–2045 tenors at step-up coupons), and the PDI Bonds (PDI-specific repayment schedule) — began secondary-market trading immediately after settlement. The initial secondary-market trading produced prices substantially above the IMF's debt-sustainability baseline, suggesting that the market had priced the Exchange terms more favourably than the IMF's DSA had assumed. The implications for the long-term debt-sustainability trajectory are addressed in Section 10.5.

9.4 The Comparative Significance — Sub-Saharan African Eurobond Restructurings

The Ghana Eurobond Exchange was the third major sub-Saharan African Eurobond restructuring of the post-2020 sovereign-debt-crisis cluster, after Zambia (which had completed its Eurobond Exchange in March 2024 on broadly parallel terms) and concurrent with the parallel Sri Lankan restructuring (which closed in December 2024 on different terms reflecting the South Asian sovereign's distinct creditor mix). The Ghana–Zambia–Sri Lanka cluster has been studied by the IMF and the Institute of International Finance as a reference architecture for post-2020 sovereign-debt-restructuring — particularly regarding the operationalisation of comparability-of-treatment across diverse creditor classes.

10. The Macroeconomic Recovery Trajectory (2023–2025)

10.1 Inflation Moderation

Headline CPI inflation, having peaked at 54.1% in December 2022, declined through 2023 and 2024 along a path that was modestly faster than IMF programme baseline projections. The Ghana Statistical Service monthly CPI releases tracked the trajectory: 52.8% (January 2023); 43.1% (April 2023); 40.1% (July 2023); 35.2% (October 2023); 23.2% (December 2023); 25.8% (March 2024); 20.9% (July 2024); 22.1% (October 2024); 23.0% (November 2024). The food-inflation component followed a broadly parallel path with somewhat more month-on-month volatility. The cumulative price-level increase across the period January 2022 through November 2024 was approximately 130% on the headline CPI — the largest two-year-and-eleven-month cumulative inflation in post-1992 Ghanaian fiscal history.

The disinflation was substantially driven by three factors. First, the cumulative cedi-stabilisation (Section 10.2) reduced imported-inflation pressure substantially through 2023 and 2024. Second, the Bank of Ghana's sustained Policy Rate at the 27–30% peak through most of 2023 and 2024 anchored inflation expectations and compressed credit-driven demand. Third, the base-effect dynamics of the 2022 inflation peak meant that mathematical disinflation occurred even without sustained month-on-month price stability through late 2023.

10.2 Cedi Stabilisation

The cedi-dollar interbank rate, having reached approximately ¢14.50/USD in November 2022 and approximately ¢12.50/USD in February 2023 after the DDEP settlement and the IMF Staff-Level Agreement, stabilised through 2023 in the ¢11.00–¢12.50/USD range. The 2024 cedi trajectory showed renewed depreciation through Q2–Q3 2024 (to approximately ¢15.50/USD by October 2024) before stabilising in the ¢15.00–¢15.50/USD range through Q4 2024. The cumulative depreciation from January 2022 through December 2024 was approximately 60% in nominal terms — significant but materially less than would have been expected from the pre-DDEP trajectory.

The cedi-stabilisation was substantially supported by the IMF programme's foreign-exchange-reserve accumulation (Section 10.3) and by the post-2023 Bank of Ghana posture of allowing the cedi to find a market-clearing level rather than defending a specific rate.

10.3 Reserves Recovery

Gross international reserves, having reached a trough of approximately USD 2.7 billion in November 2022 (and a substantially lower net-reserves figure), recovered progressively through the programme period. The trajectory: USD 5.9 billion (December 2023); USD 7.2 billion (June 2024); USD 8.9 billion (October 2024, including encumbered reserves); USD 9.5 billion (March 2025); approximately USD 10.0 billion (mid-2025). The cumulative reserves accumulation through the programme period exceeded the IMF programme baseline by approximately USD 1.5–2.0 billion as of mid-2025.

The reserves accumulation was supported by several factors: the IMF programme disbursements (cumulative approximately USD 2.4 billion through the Fourth Review); the World Bank Development Policy Operations (cumulative approximately USD 1.5 billion); the African Development Bank parallel financing; the post-2023 increase in gold-and-cocoa export receipts (with gold prices rising substantially through 2023–2025); the post-DDEP-and-Eurobond-restructuring reduction in external-debt-service requirements; and the cumulative effect of remittances (approximately USD 4.6 billion in 2024, modestly above the 2023 figure).

10.4 Fiscal Trajectory

The primary fiscal balance, having reached a deficit of −4.3% of GDP in FY 2022, moved to approximately −0.6% in FY 2023 (a substantial consolidation, achieved through both revenue-mobilisation gains and expenditure compression) and to +0.3% in FY 2024 outturn — the first primary surplus since 2014. The FY 2025 target under the IMF programme was a surplus of 1.0% of GDP; preliminary 2025 mid-year data suggested the target was on track for achievement.

The total fiscal balance (including interest payments) followed a parallel path: a deficit of approximately 11.7% of GDP in FY 2020, 9.7% in FY 2021, 11.8% in FY 2022 (the peak); compressed to approximately 4.6% in FY 2023; 4.2% in FY 2024 outturn; with the FY 2025 target of approximately 3.8%. The cumulative fiscal consolidation was substantial — approximately 8 percentage points of GDP across three years — and represented the largest single fiscal consolidation in post-1992 Ghanaian fiscal history.

10.5 The Fourth Review (April 2025) Verdict

The IMF's Fourth Review of the ECF, completed in April 2025 (the first programme review under the post-2024 Mahama administration), produced a broadly positive verdict on the cumulative programme performance. The Review concluded that: most quantitative performance criteria had been met (with selected criteria meeting target with adjustment); the structural-benchmark progress had been substantial though selected delays were noted; the overall debt-sustainability trajectory was improving toward the programme-end target. The Fourth Review tranche disbursement of approximately USD 360 million was approved and disbursed in April 2025.

The Review also noted certain residual concerns: the tax-revenue-to-GDP ratio trajectory remained below the original programme baseline; the post-DDEP financial-sector recapitalisation trajectory required continued attention; the secondary-market pricing of the post-Exchange Eurobonds suggested that the market had priced the Exchange more favourably than the IMF DSA had assumed, with implications for the calibration of the long-term debt trajectory. The post-2025 programme trajectory through the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Reviews — extending through 2026 — was projected to require continued discipline on the fiscal-consolidation pillar.

11. The Post-2024 Mahama Macro Inheritance

11.1 The 7 January 2025 Inauguration

The 7 January 2025 inauguration of John Dramani Mahama at Independence Square in Accra was the first non-consecutive presidential return in Ghanaian Fourth-Republic history and the first such return in any sub-Saharan African multi-party democracy of comparable institutional consolidation. Mahama, who had served as President from 24 July 2012 (succeeding the late President John Atta Mills; see GH-D-01) through 7 January 2017, had lost the 2016 election to Akufo-Addo by 9.45 percentage points; had lost the 2020 election by 3.94 points (with a Supreme Court petition dismissed in March 2021); and had won the 2024 election by 16.60 points.

The inauguration speech of 7 January 2025 — delivered before approximately 30,000 attendees including foreign heads of state, former Ghanaian presidents (Kufuor and Rawlings; see GH-C-01, GH-B-01), the diplomatic corps, the National House of Chiefs, the religious leadership, and the public — emphasised continuity-with-modification in the IMF programme; the commitment to "Reset" the Ghanaian institutional architecture; the rejection of the e-Levy, the COVID-Health-Recovery Levy, and the betting tax (cumulatively the post-2021 NPP-administration domestic-revenue mobilisation measures); the commitment to the 24-Hour Economy framework; and the commitment to broad institutional reform.

11.2 The Forson Appointment and the Cabinet Architecture

The appointment of Dr Cassiel Ato Forson as Minister of Finance — announced on the day of inauguration and confirmed by parliamentary vetting in January 2025 — was the central economic-policy appointment of the new administration. Forson had served as Deputy Minister of Finance under the second Mahama administration (2013–2017); had been a Minority Member of Parliament for Ajumako-Enyan-Esiam through the 2017–2024 period; and had been the NDC's principal economic-policy spokesperson through the 2020 and 2024 election cycles. His appointment was therefore widely anticipated and reflected the deep continuity within the NDC's economic-policy leadership.

The parallel appointments of Dr Johnson Asiama as Bank of Ghana Governor (succeeding Dr Ernest Addison, whose statutory term had expired); of [TBD-VERIFY: precise composition of the Cassiel-Ato-Forson Ministry of Finance leadership team including Deputy Ministers and senior career-officer reassignments through Q1 2025] established the operational architecture of the post-2024 economic-policy team.

11.3 The 11 March 2025 Budget Statement

The 2025 Budget Statement, delivered by Finance Minister Forson to Parliament on 11 March 2025, was the first comprehensive economic-policy document of the new administration. The Budget articulated continuity on three principal dimensions and modification on three others.

Continuity dimensions:

IMF Programme Continuation: The Budget reaffirmed Ghana's commitment to the ECF programme through its scheduled completion in 2026; the Fourth Review was completed in April 2025 on parallel terms.
External-Debt-Restructuring Implementation: The Budget reaffirmed the implementation of the November 2024 Eurobond Exchange and the June 2024 Common Framework bilateral agreement; no renegotiation of either was proposed.
Macroeconomic-Stabilisation Trajectory: The Budget retained the broad fiscal-consolidation trajectory of the IMF programme, including the primary-surplus targets through FY 2028.

Modification dimensions:

Revenue-Architecture Repeal: The Budget repealed the e-Levy (the 1% mobile-money transactions levy), the COVID-Health-Recovery Levy (the 1% surcharge on goods and services), and the betting tax (the 10% withholding tax on betting winnings). The cumulative revenue cost of the repeals was estimated at approximately ₵5–7 billion annually; the Budget proposed compensating measures including selected modifications to the VAT base, the Property Tax framework, and the parallel administrative-reform measures at the Ghana Revenue Authority.
Social-Spending Expansion: The Budget proposed the strengthening of selected social-spending categories within the IMF social-spending floor, including the LEAP cash-transfer programme, the National Health Insurance Scheme allocation, and the Free Senior High School programme funding.
Institutional-Reform Initiatives: The Budget proposed the Women's Development Bank legislation (subsequently passed in May 2025); selected modifications to the Public Financial Management Act framework; the 24-Hour Economy framework implementation through targeted incentives for selected sectors.

11.4 The Continuation-with-Modification Posture

The Mahama administration's posture has been substantially shaped by the operational reality that the IMF programme architecture is structurally locked in through 2026 — the post-DDEP, post-Common-Framework, post-Eurobond-Exchange constraints leave limited scope for renegotiation in the short term. The continuation-with-modification posture has accepted these constraints while modifying selected programme features through bilateral engagement with the IMF.

The principal modifications have included: the strengthening of the social-spending floor (operationalised through the FY 2025 Budget); the renegotiation of selected structural benchmarks (notably the timing of certain revenue-administration reforms); the parallel engagement with the World Bank on the post-DDEP financial-sector follow-on operations. The cumulative effect has been a posture that the IMF has characterised as "broadly consistent with programme objectives" while accommodating the political-economy commitments of the new administration.

11.5 The Post-2024 Distributional-and-Credibility Politics

The post-2024 political-economy environment is conditioned by three durable factors: the cumulative price-level increase of approximately 130% across 2022–2024 that compressed real-incomes substantially; the post-DDEP distributional incidence that remains rhetorically unresolved; and the post-Eurobond-Exchange external-credibility trajectory whose long-run implications will only become clear through the post-2026 horizon.

The Mahama administration's engagement with these factors has been the central post-2024 political-economy story. The 24-Hour Economy framework, the e-Levy repeal, the Women's Development Bank, and the parallel selected institutional-reform initiatives have been positioned by the administration as the structural-policy response to the cumulative distributional incidence. The opposition NPP — operating now as the principal Minority in Parliament with 88 seats — has positioned the post-2024 trajectory as a substantially-stabilised handover whose subsequent political-economic management belongs entirely to the inheritor administration. The contestation between these framings will substantially shape the 2028 election cycle (the next scheduled presidential election).

12. The Contested Record — Three Accounts

12.1 Account A — DDEP Design Rationale (Ministry-of-Finance / IMF)

The Ministry-of-Finance and IMF position on the DDEP design rationale rests on three principal claims.

First, that the DDEP's structuring — coupon compression and tenor extension, with limited principal haircut — was calibrated to deliver the minimum debt-stock reduction required under the IMF's debt-sustainability framework while preserving as much nominal-creditor protection as possible. An alternative structuring with substantial nominal-principal haircut would have produced a larger immediate distributional incidence on bondholders; the chosen coupon-compression-and-tenor-extension architecture distributed the cost across the present-value calculation but preserved the nominal-principal claim.

Second, that the negotiated modifications between 5 December 2022 and 31 January 2023 — particularly the individual-bondholder exemption (below ₵25,000), the pensioner-above-59 exemption, the pension-fund modified terms, and the financial-sector recapitalisation mechanism through the Ghana Financial Stability Fund — addressed the most-concerning distributional incidence. Further protections (e.g. broader pension-fund exemption; comprehensive individual-bondholder exemption regardless of holdings) would have compromised the aggregate fiscal-restructuring sufficiency required by the IMF framework.

Third, that the alternative trajectory — declining IMF support; pursuing unilateral default without programme engagement; or pursuing prolonged negotiation that delayed restructuring — would have produced substantially worse outcomes. The cumulative reserves trajectory through Q3 2022 was sufficient to demand action; the binding-constraint character of the choice was operative; the Programme architecture as executed was the available least-bad option.

Named partisans of this account include the post-DDEP Ofori-Atta public commentary; IMF staff and Management public commentary (the May 2023 Board Approval briefings; the successive Review briefings); selected academic commentary including aspects of the Joseph Kraus analyses in African Affairs; selected commentary from the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) and parallel policy-research institutions.

12.2 Account B — Bondholder-and-Pensioner Equity Tensions

The Pensioners Association of Ghana, the Ghana Individual Bondholders Forum, and the parallel civil-society position on the DDEP's distributional incidence rests on four principal claims.

First, that the DDEP constituted a constitutional breach of the implicit contract between the state and its retail creditors. The state had encouraged individual investors, pensioners, and the cumulative retail-savings constituency to allocate financial assets to sovereign cedi-denominated debt on the basis of an implicit guarantee that such allocations were risk-free; the DDEP's distributional incidence on these categories was a violation of that implicit guarantee that no negotiated modification could fully redress.

Second, that the calibration of the DDEP-exemption thresholds was inadequate. The ₵25,000 individual-bondholder threshold was substantially below the average individual-bondholder holding (estimated at approximately ₵85,000 [TBD-VERIFY: the precise distribution of individual-bondholder holdings across the relevant threshold has been the subject of partial disclosure with material data remaining unpublished]); the pension-fund modified terms still produced material present-value loss on retirement-savings allocations; the financial-sector recapitalisation mechanism socialised costs through the fiscal budget while preserving the institutional-creditor positions.

Third, that the sequencing — domestic restructuring before external — placed the initial restructuring burden on Ghanaian institutional and retail creditors before the external commercial creditors had committed to comparable contributions. The eventual comparability-of-treatment achievement was, on this view, achieved through Ghanaian retail-creditor sacrifice that funded the credibility of the subsequent external negotiation.

Fourth, that the post-DDEP political-rhetorical framing — that "shared sacrifice" was the necessary cost of debt sustainability — obscured the underlying distributional reality that the sacrifice was disproportionately borne by retail creditors, pensioners, and the cumulative domestic-economy intermediation chain rather than by the cohort of large institutional and external commercial creditors who had benefited from the pre-2022 high-coupon environment.

Named partisans of this account include the cumulative Pensioners Association of Ghana public statements; the Ghana Individual Bondholders Forum public statements; selected academic commentary including aspects of the Joseph Ayee and Daniel Appiah analyses at the University of Ghana ISSER; the Stephen Yeboah / Africa Centre for Energy Policy critical commentary on the broader DDEP-and-IMF-programme framework; aspects of the Imani Centre for Policy and Education analysis (which has been more nuanced, recognising both the design constraints and the distributional concerns).

12.3 Account C — Post-2024 Mahama Macro Inheritance

The third durable account concerns the political-economic characterisation of the post-2024 macroeconomic inheritance. Two positions structure the contestation.

The NDC / Mahama administration position frames the inheritance as a structurally damaged macroeconomic environment requiring further structural-corrective action. On this view, the cumulative 2022–2024 trajectory — the DDEP distributional incidence, the cumulative 130% price-level increase, the post-DDEP financial-sector recapitalisation costs that continue to weigh on the fiscal balance, the post-Eurobond-Exchange external-debt-service trajectory that remains elevated relative to the pre-2022 baseline — produced a macroeconomic environment whose stabilisation requires substantial further intervention. The 24-Hour Economy framework, the e-Levy repeal, the Women's Development Bank, and the parallel selected institutional-reform initiatives are framed as the necessary structural-corrective response.

The NPP / Bawumia opposition position frames the inheritance as a substantially-stabilised macroeconomic handover whose subsequent political-economic management belongs to the inheritor. On this view, the cumulative 2022–2024 trajectory — the DDEP completion in February 2023, the IMF programme entry in May 2023, the Common Framework bilateral agreement in June 2024, the Eurobond Exchange in November 2024 — produced by January 2025 a substantially stabilised macroeconomic position. The inflation trajectory had compressed to approximately 23%; the cedi had stabilised; reserves had recovered to approximately USD 9 billion; the primary fiscal balance had moved to surplus; the first programme review under the new administration (April 2025) had been positively concluded. The post-2024 political-economy belongs, on this view, to the Mahama administration's management of the inherited recovery rather than to the prior administration's design of it.

The contestation between these framings will substantially shape the 2028 election cycle. The empirical evidence — the post-2025 inflation trajectory, the cedi stability, the fiscal-consolidation maintenance, the financial-sector recovery — will adjudicate the contestation in operational terms; the political-rhetorical contestation will continue in parallel.

Named partisans of Account C(i) — the Mahama administration position — include the 7 January 2025 inaugural address; the 11 March 2025 Budget Statement; subsequent ministerial commentary through 2025; selected NDC-aligned commentary including aspects of the Stephen Yeboah / ACEP framework. Named partisans of Account C(ii) — the NPP opposition position — include the post-2024 Bawumia public commentary; the post-2024 NPP parliamentary minority commentary; selected NPP-aligned commentary including aspects of the Imani Centre for Policy and Education framework on the inherited stabilisation.

13. Conclusion — The Crisis-and-Recovery as Foundational Architecture of the Post-2024 Republic

The 2022–2025 sovereign-debt crisis and recovery was the most consequential single Ghanaian economic-policy episode of the post-2010 period and the foundational economic-policy architecture conditioning the December 2024 Mahama election, the 7 January 2025 transition, and the subsequent post-2024 trajectory. The cumulative event sequence — the November 2022 cedi-and-reserves crisis; the 5 December 2022 DDEP launch; the 19 December 2022 external-debt-service suspension; the 12 December 2022 IMF Staff-Level Agreement; the 14 February 2023 DDEP settlement; the 17 May 2023 IMF Board Approval; the 12 January 2024 Common Framework preliminary MoU; the 1 April 2024 Eurobond agreement-in-principle; the 11 June 2024 Common Framework final agreement; the 3 October 2024 Eurobond Exchange Offer launch; the 7 November 2024 Eurobond settlement; the 7 December 2024 election; the 7 January 2025 Mahama inauguration; the 11 March 2025 Budget Statement; the April 2025 IMF Fourth Review — constitutes a tightly interlocking architecture that has produced a distinctive post-2024 governance environment.

The comparative-African and comparative-Global-South significance of the case is substantial. The Ghana DDEP was the first major post-2010 sub-Saharan African sovereign restructuring of locally-denominated debt; the bilateral-debt restructuring was the third G20 Common Framework case to reach completion; the Eurobond Exchange was a third major sub-Saharan African Eurobond restructuring of the post-2020 cluster after Zambia and concurrent with Sri Lanka. The cumulative case has been studied by the IMF, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Institute of International Finance, and parallel academic-policy institutions as a reference architecture for subsequent restructurings — both procedurally (the operationalisation of comparability-of-treatment across diverse creditor classes; the role of China as Common Framework co-chair; the speed of negotiation relative to earlier cases) and (the distribution of present-value haircut across coupon, tenor, and principal components; the design of social-spending floors within fiscal-consolidation programmes; the architecture of financial-sector recapitalisation in post-restructuring contexts).

Three structural questions will determine the long-term verdict on the trajectory across the post-2025 horizon.

First, whether the post-DDEP IMF programme produces durable fiscal recovery through programme completion in 2026 and beyond, or whether the post-2026 trajectory will require additional restructuring. The tax-revenue-to-GDP trajectory remains below the original programme baseline; the post-DDEP financial-sector recapitalisation continues to weigh on the fiscal balance; the post-Eurobond-Exchange external-debt-service profile rises modestly after the front-loaded 2025–2027 relief. The cumulative trajectory will determine whether the 2022–2024 restructuring was sufficient or whether further restructuring will be required in the post-2030 horizon.

Second, whether the Mahama administration's continuation-with-modification posture produces durable political-economic stabilisation or whether the cumulative post-2024 political-coalition pressure produces material renegotiation. The 24-Hour Economy framework's implementation; the post-e-Levy revenue-architecture re-design; the post-DDEP financial-sector follow-through; and the parallel Women's Development Bank and institutional-reform initiatives will be the principal indicators of whether the post-2024 trajectory consolidates or fragments.

Third, whether the cumulative DDEP-distributional incidence produces durable political-coalition pressure or whether the post-2025 trajectory produces gradual political-rhetorical stabilisation. The post-2024 engagement with the Pensioners Association, the Ghana Individual Bondholders Forum, and the parallel civil-society constituencies; the post-2024 calibration of the social-spending floor; and the parallel post-2024 institutional-reform initiatives will be the principal indicators of whether the distributional politics of 2022–2024 are gradually absorbed or persistently rhetorical.

This document, written in the post-2024 Mahama administration period and approximately thirty months after the December 2022 DDEP launch, records the cumulative crisis-and-recovery, the IMF programme implementation, the external-debt restructuring, the post-2024 inheritance, and the contested record as they have crystallised through mid-2025. The post-2026 IMF programme completion, the parallel post-2026 financial-sector consolidation, and the 2028 election cycle will produce the next layer of evidence on the trajectory. Future research waves should refresh this document in late 2026 (post-programme-completion) and again in early 2029 (post-election) to update the empirical record and to extend the contested-record analysis with the additional evidence then available.

End of document. Status: DRAFT. Version: 2026-05-15. Cross-references include forward links to GH-D-04 (sister micro-treatment, now superseded by this anchor) and to GH-E-01 (sequel). Symmetry sweep pending: GH-D-04, GH-D-03, GH-E-01 should add back-references to GH-D-02; GH-A-02, GH-B-01, GH-C-01, GH-I-01, GH-R-01 to receive back-references on next symmetry pass.

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Ministry of Finance, Republic of Ghana, Eurobond Exchange Offer Memorandum, 3 October 2024; Final Results, 6 November 2024.
Ministry of Finance, Republic of Ghana, Budget Statements and Economic Policies of the Government of Ghana, FY 2021 through FY 2025 (annual; with mid-year reviews).
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Hon. Ken Ofori-Atta (Minister of Finance, 2017 – February 2024), DDEP Launch Press Conference, Ministry of Finance, Accra, 5 December 2022; Mid-Year Budget Review Address, July 2023.
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GH-A-02: Nkrumah Era and the First Republic (1957–1966) — the foundational sovereignty-and-development frame against which post-2022 debt-restructuring debates were rhetorically situated
GH-B-01: Rawlings Era (1979–2001) — the historical PNDC structural-adjustment frame within which Ghanaian IMF-programme experience was first systematised
GH-C-01: 1992 Constitution and the Fourth Republic (Kufuor presidency-era cross-reference) — the HIPC-and-MDRI debt-relief baseline of 2001–2006 from which post-2010 re-leveraging trajectory began
GH-D-03: Nana Akufo-Addo Presidency (2017–2024) — era parent within which the crisis arose
GH-D-04: 2022 Domestic Debt Exchange and the IMF Programme — sister micro-treatment (now superseded by this anchor)
GH-E-01: The 7 December 2024 Election and the Mahama Return — sequel
GH-I-01: Electoral Commission of Ghana — institutional reference for the December 2024 election that adjudicated the crisis trajectory
GH-R-01: Ghana Governance Books Canon
GH-E-02: John Mahama's Second Presidency: 24-Hour Economy, Reset Cabinet, and the First Hundred Days of Recovery (January–April 2025)
GH-E-03: Galamsey, the Mining Sector, and the GoldBod Architecture: Ghana's Battle Against Illegal Mining (2017–2025)
GH-O-02: ghana democratic alternation 1992 2025 and the ndc npp system
GH-E-04: Mahama Year 1 mid-term fiscal Reset agenda
GH-B-02: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
GH-H-PRES-06: Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo — A Biography
GH-B-03: The Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) Rule — Rawlings's Eleven-Year Revolution and the Path to the Fourth Republic
GH-C-02: The Acheampong–Akuffo–Limann Era — NRC, SMC, AFRC, and the Third Republic
GH-D-05: Akufo-Addo Year One — The 7 January 2017 Inauguration, the Free SHS Launch, the Bauxite-for-Sinohydro Decision, Planting for Food and Jobs, and the Office of the Special Prosecutor
GH-F-02: Ghana–China Bauxite-for-Infrastructure and the Belt and Road Initiative
GH-D-06: Mahama Year Two (January 2026 – January 2027) — Fiscal Recovery, 24-Hour Economy Implementation, and the 2028 Mid-Term Test
GH-D-07: Akufo-Addo Second Term 2021–2024 — Cedi Crisis, DDEP, and the Path to 2024 Defeat
GH-J-02: The Galamsey Illegal Mining Crisis — Three Accounts
GH-G-02: Cocoa Political Economy — COCOBOD and the Farmer-State Bargain
GH-N-01: Ghana in International Perceptions — Democracy Beacon, Adjustment Poster Child, and the Debt Cycle
GH-K-02: The 2017 Free SHS Decision and Its Fiscal Politics
GH-O-01: Ghana Megatrends — The 2030s Questions
GH-G-03: Ghana's Power Sector — Dumsor and the IPP Debt Trap