GH-D-07: Akufo-Addo Second Term 2021–2024 — Cedi Crisis, DDEP, and the Path to 2024 Defeat

1. Outline and Scope

This document tracks the political-economic narrative of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's second presidential term from the 7 January 2021 swearing-in (following the contested 137–137 hung parliament that produced the all-night 6–7 January 2021 Speakership election of Alban Bagbin) through the 7 January 2025 handover to John Dramani Mahama. The second term is the period in which the post-2017 macroeconomic trajectory that the Akufo-Addo administration had inherited and reshaped culminated in the deepest sovereign-debt crisis of Ghana's Fourth-Republic period (1992–) and in the most decisive single-cycle electoral repudiation of an incumbent governing party in that same period. Where GH-D-03 (Akufo-Addo Presidency 2017–2024) documents the eight-year presidency as a single governing record, where GH-D-02 and GH-D-04 document the December 2022 Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP) and the May 2023 IMF Extended Credit Facility (ECF) as the defining economic episode, and where GH-H-PRES-06 records the man across his whole life, this document is the second-term political-economy lens: the November 2021 e-Levy announcement that set the parliamentary year of 2022 alight; the 58% cedi depreciation between January and November 2022; the 5 December 2022 DDEP launch and the 19 December 2022 external debt-service suspension; the 17 May 2023 IMF Executive Board approval of the USD 3 billion ECF; the cumulative macroeconomic adjustment of 2023–2024; the parallel galamsey and Achimota Forest controversies; the 23 January 2024 NPP presidential primary that selected Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia as the party's candidate; the 7 December 2024 election; and the orderly transition.

The sections proceed chronologically and thematically. Section 2 (Key Takeaways) states the interpretive core. Section 3 covers the 7 December 2020 narrow re-election (Akufo-Addo 51.30% / Mahama 47.36%, margin 3.94 percentage points) and the 137–137 hung parliament that conditioned the second-term parliamentary politics, including the all-night 6–7 January 2021 Bagbin Speakership election. Section 4 covers the post-2020 macroeconomic baseline — the FY 2020 11.7%-of-GDP fiscal deficit produced by the COVID-19 response; the FY 2021 9.7%-of-GDP deficit; the 2021 USD 3.025 billion Eurobond issuance at coupons of 7.75%–8.875% that proved to be Ghana's last; and the IMF Article IV 2021 Consultation that flagged the trajectory as "high risk of debt distress". Section 5 covers the November 2021 Budget and the e-Levy announcement — the 1.75% electronic-transaction levy that the Minority NDC contested through walkouts, point-of-order interventions, and the 21 December 2021 chamber-floor altercation; the Speaker Bagbin's procedural rulings; the eventual passage at a reduced 1.5% rate in March 2022 amid further procedural disputes; and the May 2022 implementation that produced revenue at approximately 10–15% of the November 2021 projection. Section 6 covers the 2022 cedi-and-inflation cascade — the closure of Eurobond access in March 2022 after the US Federal Reserve tightening cycle began; the cedi's depreciation from ¢6.10/USD in January 2022 to ¢14.50/USD in November 2022; the inflation rise from 13.9% in January to 54.1% in December 2022; the Bank of Ghana Monetary Policy Committee's progressive Policy Rate increases under Governor Ernest Addison; and the reserves trough below USD 1.5 billion in October 2022. Section 7 covers the July 2022 Akufo-Addo address committing to seek IMF support, the July–November 2022 staff-level engagement, and the November–December 2022 framework decisions that produced the 5 December 2022 DDEP and the 19 December 2022 external default announcements. Section 8 covers the DDEP launch and the December 2022 – February 2023 renegotiation that produced the modified terms, the Pensioners Association of Ghana picket on 27 December 2022 at the Ministry of Finance, and the 14 February 2023 settlement at approximately 85% participation. Section 9 covers the 17 May 2023 IMF ECF approval and the macroeconomic adjustment programme through end-2024 — the 30.0% peak Policy Rate held March 2023 – August 2024; the disinflation from 54.1% (December 2022) to 23.2% (December 2023) to approximately 23.8% (November 2024); the primary-balance recovery from a 4.3%-of-GDP deficit in FY 2022 to a 0.3% surplus in FY 2024. Section 10 covers the bilateral and commercial external debt restructuring — the G20 Common Framework Official Creditor Committee co-chaired by China and France formed June 2023, the 12 January 2024 MOU, the 11 June 2024 final agreement on approximately USD 5.4 billion of bilateral debt, the 3 October 2024 Eurobond Exchange Offer launch covering approximately USD 13.1 billion at an estimated 37% present-value haircut, and the 6 November 2024 close at approximately 95% participation. Section 11 covers the parallel scandal-and-controversy record of the second term — the 2021 Agyapa minerals royalty deal contestation; the 2022 Achimota Forest declassification and the so-called "Sir John will" episode; the 2023–2024 galamsey trajectory and the September 2024 Coalition Against Illegal Mining march; the 2023–2024 LGBT+ / Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill that Akufo-Addo did not sign. Section 12 covers the 23 January 2024 NPP presidential primary at the University of Ghana, the Bawumia–Kennedy Agyapong–Kyerematen contest, the post-primary campaign architecture, and the 7 December 2024 result (Mahama 56.55% / Bawumia 41.61%, a margin of approximately 14.94 percentage points). Section 13 covers the 7 January 2025 handover and the closing assessment of the second term as a discrete political-economic unit. Section 14 returns to three-account framing — the IMF / Bank of Ghana / Ministry of Finance technical reading, the CDD-Ghana / IDEG / civil-society distributional-incidence reading, and the NPP / NDC partisan readings — and forward-views the post-2024 reading of the second term across the 2025–2028 horizon.

Throughout, the tone is analytical and source-grounded, neither hagiographic nor demonising. The contested 2022 crisis is recorded with both the IMF Article IV cumulative diagnosis and the post-2024 NDC framing of the inheritance; the 2024 defeat is recorded as the cumulative-NPP-incumbency outcome rather than personalised to Akufo-Addo or to Bawumia. Uncertain dates, statistics, and quotations are tagged [TBD-VERIFY].

Primary Sources Consulted:

1. International Monetary Fund. Ghana — 2021 Article IV Consultation, Staff Report (IMF Country Report No. 21/165, July 2021).
2. International Monetary Fund. Ghana — Request for an Arrangement Under the Extended Credit Facility, Staff Report (IMF Country Report No. 23/168, May 2023).
3. International Monetary Fund. Ghana — First, Second, Third, and Fourth Reviews under the Extended Credit Facility (IMF Country Reports, 2023–2025; First Review October 2023, Second Review June 2024, Third Review December 2024, Fourth Review April 2025).
4. Bank of Ghana. Monetary Policy Committee Press Releases, January 2021 – December 2024 (forty-eight bi-monthly MPC statements signed by Governor Dr Ernest Addison).
5. Bank of Ghana. Annual Report 2022 and Annual Report 2023 (Accra: Bank of Ghana, 2023 and 2024).
6. Ministry of Finance, Republic of Ghana. The Budget Statement and Economic Policy of the Government of Ghana for the Financial Year 2022 (presented to Parliament 17 November 2021 by Minister Ken Ofori-Atta).
7. Ministry of Finance, Republic of Ghana. Mid-Year Fiscal Policy Review of the 2022 Budget Statement (presented to Parliament 25 July 2022).
8. Ministry of Finance, Republic of Ghana. Press Release on the Suspension of Payments on Certain Categories of Ghana's External Debt (19 December 2022).
9. Ministry of Finance, Republic of Ghana. Domestic Debt Exchange Programme — Exchange Memorandum (5 December 2022; Amended and Restated 31 January 2023).
10. Daily Graphic (Accra). News and editorial coverage, 7 January 2021 – 7 January 2025.
11. Joy News / Multimedia Group. Reportage and NewsFile commentary, January 2021 – January 2025, including the December 2021 e-Levy parliamentary altercation coverage and the December 2022 DDEP launch coverage.
12. MyJoyOnline and Citi Newsroom digital coverage of the 2021–2024 macroeconomic trajectory.
13. Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana). Afrobarometer Round 9 (Ghana), fieldwork April–May 2022, and Round 10 (Ghana), fieldwork May–June 2024; CDD-Ghana election briefings on the December 2024 cycle.
14. Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG). Quarterly Democracy and Governance Briefings, 2021–2024.
15. IMANI Centre for Policy and Education. e-Levy: A Policy Analysis (Accra: IMANI, December 2021) and subsequent macroeconomic-policy commentaries.
16. Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP). Sub-Saharan Africa Debt Sustainability Tracker — Ghana Module, 2022–2024.
17. Penplusbytes / Media Foundation for West Africa. 2024 Ghana Election Reporting Brief.
18. Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO). Final Statement on the 2024 General Elections (December 2024).
19. Pensioners Association of Ghana. Public Statements on the DDEP, December 2022 – February 2023.
20. Ghana Individual Bondholders Forum / Financial Stability Concerned Citizens. Public Statements on the DDEP, December 2022 – February 2023.
21. Whitfield, Lindsay. Economies after Colonialism: Ghana and the Struggle for Power (Cambridge University Press, 2018) — referenced for pre-2018 baseline.
22. Daddieh, Cyril. Historical Dictionary of Ghana (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) — referenced for biographical and institutional baseline.

Related Documents:

• GH-A-01: Pre-Independence Gold Coast, UGCC, CPP (1947–1957)

• GH-A-02: Nkrumah Era and the First Republic (1957–1966)

• GH-A-03: 1966 Coup and the NLC Era (1966–1969)

• GH-B-01: Rawlings Era (1979–2001)

• GH-B-02: Era of Instability — Coups, NRC, SMC, Road to Rawlings (1966–1981)

• GH-B-03: PNDC Rule (1981–1992)

• GH-C-01: Kufuor Presidency (2001–2009)

• GH-C-02: Acheampong, Akuffo, Limann (1972–1981)

• GH-D-01: Mills and Mahama Presidencies (2009–2017)

• GH-D-02: 2022 Domestic Debt Exchange and IMF Programme

• GH-D-03: Akufo-Addo Presidency (2017–2024)

• GH-D-04: 2022 Domestic Debt Exchange — IMF Programme (Companion)

• GH-D-05: Akufo-Addo Year One (2017) and the Free SHS Launch

• GH-D-06: Mahama Year Two (2026–2027) — Fiscal Recovery and Mid-Term Test

• GH-E-01: 2024 Election and the Mahama Return

• GH-E-02: Mahama Second Presidency — First Hundred Days (2025)

• GH-E-03: Galamsey Crackdown, Mining Sector, and the GoldBod Architecture (2017–2025)

• GH-E-04: Mahama Year One Mid-Term (2025–2026) — Fiscal Reset and the Reset Agenda

• GH-F-01: Ghana Foreign Policy — From Nkrumah Pan-Africanism to ECOWAS / AES Rupture (1957–2025)

• GH-F-02: Ghana–China — Bauxite for Infrastructure and the Belt and Road (2017–2026)

• GH-G-01: Social Policy — NHIS, Free SHS, Welfare State (2003–2026)

• GH-H-PRES-01: Kwame Nkrumah Biography

• GH-H-PRES-02: Jerry John Rawlings Biography

• GH-H-PRES-03: John Kufuor Biography

• GH-H-PRES-04: John Atta Mills Biography

• GH-H-PRES-05: John Dramani Mahama Biography

• GH-H-PRES-06: Nana Akufo-Addo Biography

• GH-O-02: Ghana Democratic Alternation (1992–2025) and the NDC–NPP System

• GH-R-01: Ghana Governance Books Canon

• GH-G-03: Ghana's Power Sector — Dumsor and the IPP Debt Trap

• GH-O-01: Ghana Megatrends — The 2030s Questions

• GH-G-02: Cocoa Political Economy — COCOBOD and the Farmer-State Bargain

• GH-J-02: The Galamsey Illegal Mining Crisis — Three Accounts

---

2. Key Takeaways

• The Akufo-Addo second term (7 January 2021 – 7 January 2025) opened with the narrowest re-election margin of any sitting Ghanaian president in the Fourth-Republic period and closed with the most decisive single-cycle repudiation of an incumbent governing party in that same period. The 7 December 2020 result — Akufo-Addo 51.30% to Mahama 47.36%, a 3.94-percentage-point margin — was followed four years later by the 7 December 2024 result — Mahama 56.55% to Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia 41.61%, a margin of approximately 14.94 percentage points (GH-E-01). The trajectory between these two electoral end-points is the political-economic content of the second term: the 137–137 hung parliament that conditioned the legislative environment from January 2021; the November 2021 e-Levy controversy and the 2022 cedi-and-inflation collapse; the 5 December 2022 DDEP announcement and the 19 December 2022 external default; the 17 May 2023 IMF ECF approval; the 2023–2024 macroeconomic adjustment; and the parallel galamsey, Achimota Forest, and LGBT+ Bill controversies that supplied the campaign rhetoric of 2024.

• The 137–137 hung parliament produced by the 7 December 2020 parliamentary election — the first hung parliament of the Fourth Republic — was the structural condition that conditioned every major legislative episode of the second term. The all-night 6–7 January 2021 Speakership election produced the surprise victory of NDC nominee Alban Bagbin over NPP nominee Mike Oquaye through a combination of NDC parliamentary discipline, the abstention of independent MP Andrew Asiamah Amoako, and the procedural rulings of the Clerk of Parliament — an outcome whose precise vote count and procedural sequence remained politically contested through 2021–2024 [TBD-VERIFY: the exact roll-call of the 6–7 January 2021 Speakership election, the question of whether one or more ballots were invalidated, and the contested NPP MP movements during the proceedings are variously reported in Daily Graphic, Joy News, and IDEG briefings; the canonical record is the Parliament of Ghana Hansard of 7 January 2021]. The Bagbin Speakership, holding the second-most-senior office of the Ghanaian state under Article 95 of the 1992 Constitution, conditioned the November 2021 e-Levy passage, the December 2022 DDEP-period parliamentary politics, and the 2023–2024 broader legislative environment in ways that produced repeated procedural disputes — including the 30 November 2021 / 21 December 2021 parliamentary altercations, the March 2022 procedural disputes, and the 2023 LGBT+ Bill passage controversies.

• The 2021 macroeconomic baseline was substantially worse than the official-presentational frame allowed. Ghana had exited its 2015–2019 IMF ECF in April 2019 and the "Ghana Beyond Aid" rhetoric of the post-exit period had framed the second-term opening as a self-financing fiscal-policy moment. The reality was that the FY 2020 fiscal deficit had reached 11.7% of GDP — the largest single-year fiscal expansion in post-1992 Ghanaian history — and the FY 2021 deficit, at approximately 9.7% of GDP, had not closed back toward the pre-COVID 4–5% trajectory. Total public debt had risen from approximately USD 41.4 billion in December 2020 to approximately USD 50.2 billion by December 2021 — a debt-to-GDP ratio of approximately 78–80% (the precise figure varied across measurement conventions). The IMF Article IV Consultation of July 2021 (IMF Country Report No. 21/165) classified Ghana's debt position as "high risk of debt distress" — the highest risk classification on the IMF Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries — and recommended fiscal-consolidation measures that the Akufo-Addo administration declined to adopt at the speed and scale recommended.

• The 17 November 2021 Budget Statement — delivered to Parliament by Minister of Finance Ken Ofori-Atta — was the central legislative-economic moment of the early second term. The Budget calibrated a FY 2022 fiscal deficit of 7.4% of GDP on three principal assumptions: continued moderate GDP growth (approximately 5.5%); domestic-revenue-mobilisation increases anchored by the proposed 1.75% Electronic Transaction Levy (e-Levy) on mobile-money and other electronic transactions above ₵100; and continued Eurobond market access for the FY 2022 financing requirement. Each assumption proved unsustainable. The e-Levy proposal triggered an immediate and sustained Minority NDC parliamentary contestation — the 30 November 2021 walkout from the Budget approval vote; the 21 December 2021 chamber-floor altercation between Majority and Minority MPs (over the propriety of voting on the Appropriation Bill); the March 2022 procedural disputes; and the eventual May 2022 passage at a reduced rate of 1.5% on transactions above ₵100, with selected exemptions. The e-Levy revenue, when implementation began on 1 May 2022, underperformed the November 2021 projection by approximately 85–90% across FY 2022 — a structural shortfall that compounded the fiscal pressure through the year.

• The 2022 cedi cascade was the proximate macroeconomic event that converted the underlying debt-sustainability concerns into a full-spectrum sovereign-debt crisis. The cedi-dollar interbank rate, which had stood at approximately ¢6.10/USD in January 2022, depreciated progressively through the year: to ¢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 Economic Recovery Programme devaluation (GH-B-03). The proximate triggers were external — the post-March 2022 US Federal Reserve tightening cycle that closed Eurobond market access across the sub-Saharan African sovereign cluster; the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine that raised refined-petroleum and wheat import costs; the cumulative global risk-off positioning of Q2 2022 — but the underlying vulnerability was domestic, in the cumulative debt-stock build-up of 2017–2021 and the failure of domestic-revenue mobilisation through 2022.

• The Bank of Ghana under Governor Dr Ernest Addison undertook a sustained monetary-tightening response through 2022 that was insufficient on its own to restore exchange-rate stability. The Monetary Policy Rate, which had stood at 14.5% in January 2022, was raised to 17.0% in March 2022, to 19.0% in May 2022, to 22.0% in August 2022, to 24.5% in October 2022, and to 27.0% in November 2022 — a cumulative 1,250-basis-point increase in eleven months. The Bank's foreign-exchange-reserve drawdown through 2022 was simultaneously substantial: gross international reserves declined from approximately USD 9.7 billion (end-2021) to approximately USD 6.6 billion (end-Q2 2022) to approximately USD 1.5 billion (end-October 2022, on the headline measure that excluded encumbered reserves and selected gold holdings) [TBD-VERIFY: the precise October 2022 gross-international-reserves trough is variously reported across Bank of Ghana statistical bulletins as ranging from USD 1.5 billion (excluding encumbered reserves) to approximately USD 6.0 billion (including encumbered reserves and gold); the IMF May 2023 Staff Report (Country Report No. 23/168) records the relevant gross-reserves data for the programme baseline]. Headline inflation rose from 13.9% in January 2022 to 31.7% in July to 40.4% in October to 54.1% in December — the highest reading since 1995 (when the post-PNDC stabilisation programme had still been working through the Economic Recovery Programme legacy).

• The 1 July 2022 Akufo-Addo address to the nation — broadcast on Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and the major private networks — announced the government's decision to seek IMF support, formally reversing the post-2019 "Ghana Beyond Aid" trajectory. The address was framed as a response to the "exogenous shocks" of COVID-19 and the Russia–Ukraine war; the domestic origins of the fiscal pressure (the post-2020 fiscal expansion that had not been closed back; the e-Levy revenue underperformance; the failure of expenditure-restraint measures) were treated as secondary. The staff-level engagement that followed produced an IMF Mission visit to Accra in July 2022 (under Mission Chief Stéphane Roudet) and a series of subsequent technical missions through Q3 2022. The November 2022 Mid-Year Fiscal Policy Review (presented to Parliament on 24 November 2022) outlined a framework of fiscal-consolidation measures and the broad architecture of the planned debt-restructuring; the specific DDEP terms were not announced until 5 December 2022.

• The 5 December 2022 DDEP announcement at the Ministry of Finance press conference — delivered by Minister of Finance Ken Ofori-Atta — 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. The original terms 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 terms 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 — including the 27 December 2022 picket by the Pensioners Association of Ghana at the Ministry of Finance, the formation of the Ghana Individual Bondholders Forum, and the financial-institutions-cluster representations — that produced material design modifications between December 2022 and February 2023. The 14 February 2023 final settlement at approximately 85% participation produced an estimated interest-savings stream of approximately ₵61 billion through 2024–2027. (Full forensic treatment in GH-D-02 and GH-D-04.)

• 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 17 May 2023 IMF Executive Board approval of the 36-month USD 3 billion ECF — 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-and-Akufo-Addo programme) — was the structural anchor of the post-default macroeconomic adjustment. The 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 2023–2024 macroeconomic adjustment under the ECF showed substantial improvement on multiple indicators but did not recover the political-economic credibility lost in 2022. Headline inflation declined from a peak of 54.1% (December 2022) to 23.2% (December 2023) to approximately 23.8% (November 2024); the cedi stabilised in the ¢14.0–¢15.5/USD range through 2023 and 2024; gross international reserves recovered from the October 2022 trough 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 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 cumulative consumer-price increase across 2021–2024 of approximately 130% on the headline CPI was substantially unrecovered by nominal-wage adjustments — the structural reality that the macroeconomic-stabilisation narrative could not paper over in the 2024 campaign cycle.

• The external-debt restructuring proceeded through 2023–2024 under the G20 Common Framework architecture established in November 2020. 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. 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 parallel scandal-and-controversy record of the second term supplied the campaign rhetoric of 2024. The 2021 Agyapa minerals royalty deal — a proposed financial-engineering structure to monetise future gold-royalty streams through a Jersey-incorporated special-purpose vehicle (Agyapa Royalties Limited) — was suspended in 2021 after the Office of the Special Prosecutor (under Martin Amidu) raised significant concerns about the procurement process and the valuation methodology, and after CDD-Ghana and IMANI Centre for Policy and Education published critical analyses. The 2022 Achimota Forest declassification controversy — concerning the proposed reclassification of portions of the Achimota Forest Reserve and the so-called "Sir John will" (which devised portions of state forest reserve land to the family of the late NPP-aligned Forestry Commission CEO Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie) — produced sustained civil-society contestation through 2022. The 2023–2024 galamsey trajectory — the unresolved post-2017 contestation over small-scale illegal gold mining — culminated in the September 2024 Coalition Against Illegal Mining march and the parallel Ghana Trades Union Congress strike call. The 2023–2024 LGBT+ Bill / Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill — a private-member's bill that passed Parliament on 28 February 2024 — was not signed into law by Akufo-Addo before the end of his term, on the publicly-stated reasoning that pending Supreme Court litigation should be allowed to conclude first.

• The 23 January 2024 NPP presidential primary at the University of Ghana, Legon, selected Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia as the party's 2024 candidate over Trade Minister Alan Kyerematen, businessman-MP Kennedy Agyapong, Education Minister Yaw Adutwum, Agriculture Minister Bryan Acheampong, and others. Bawumia won approximately 61.4% of delegate votes against Kyerematen's approximately 14.4% and Agyapong's approximately 21.0% — a decisive first-round victory that confirmed the NPP's institutional consolidation behind the sitting Vice-President [TBD-VERIFY: precise round-by-round vote counts at the 23 January 2024 NPP primary at Legon are variously reported across Daily Graphic, Citi Newsroom, and the NPP Electoral Committee declaration; the canonical source is the NPP Electoral Committee Final Declaration of 23 January 2024]. Kyerematen subsequently resigned from the NPP in February 2024 and contested the December 2024 election as the candidate of the Movement for Change, securing approximately 1.8% of the presidential vote. The 7 December 2024 result produced Mahama 56.55% to Bawumia 41.61% (a margin of approximately 14.94 percentage points) and a simultaneous NPP parliamentary collapse from 137 to 88 seats in the 276-seat parliament — the most decisive single-cycle repudiation of an incumbent governing party in Fourth-Republic history.

• The contested record on the 2021–2024 second term clusters around three durable accounts. First, the technical / Ministry-of-Finance / IMF account: the position that the 2022 crisis was the product of exogenous shocks (COVID-19 fiscal expansion in 2020; the post-March 2022 US Federal Reserve tightening cycle; the Russia–Ukraine commodity-price shock); that the December 2022 debt-restructuring sequence was the minimum restructuring necessary under the IMF debt-sustainability framework; and that the 2023–2024 macroeconomic adjustment had stabilised the fundamentals at the handover point. Second, the CDD-Ghana / IDEG / civil-society distributional-incidence account: the position that the pre-2022 fiscal trajectory had been substantially driven by domestic policy choices that the IMF Article IV 2021 Consultation had flagged and that the administration had declined to adjust; that the DDEP imposed distributional incidence disproportionately on individual savers, pensioners, and financial institutions; and that the parallel governance-controversy record (Agyapa, Achimota, galamsey) reflected institutional weakness that the macroeconomic-recovery narrative could not paper over. Third, the NPP / NDC partisan account: the NPP framing of the inheritance handed to Mahama as a substantially-stabilised macroeconomic environment whose subsequent management belongs to the inheritor, versus the NDC framing of the inheritance as a structurally damaged macroeconomic environment requiring further corrective action. Each account is identifiable with named partisans; each will be the subject of continuing post-2025 commentary.

• The post-2024 reading of the second term, taken as a discrete political-economic unit, situates it at the intersection of three broader trajectories. First, it sits within the post-1992 NPP–NDC alternation pattern (GH-O-02): the eighth Fourth-Republic election produced the third complete two-term alternation (Rawlings NDC 1993–2001 → Kufuor NPP 2001–2009 → Mills/Mahama NDC 2009–2017 → Akufo-Addo NPP 2017–2025 → Mahama NDC 2025–) and confirmed the durability of the alternation rhythm. Second, it sits within the post-COVID sub-Saharan African debt-restructuring cluster (Zambia 2020 default and 2024 Eurobond exchange; Chad 2022 Common Framework completion; Ethiopia 2023 default; Ghana 2022 default and 2024 completion) as the third G20 Common Framework case to reach completion and the second sub-Saharan African Eurobond exchange of the post-2020 period. Third, it sits within the post-2008 Ghanaian fiscal-policy cycle (the 2009 IMF programme under Mills, the 2015 IMF programme under Mahama, the 2023 IMF programme under Akufo-Addo, the post-2025 IMF programme continuation under Mahama) that suggests a structural reliance on IMF discipline that the Fourth-Republic political-economic settlement has not yet resolved.

---

3. The 7 December 2020 Narrow Re-election and the 137–137 Hung Parliament

3.1 The Re-election Result and Its Margin

The 7 December 2020 presidential and parliamentary elections produced the political-institutional configuration within which the entire second term would operate. The Electoral Commission's certified presidential result — Akufo-Addo (NPP) 6,730,587 votes (51.30%); Mahama (NDC) 6,213,182 votes (47.36%); minor candidates and independents 175,000 votes combined (1.34%) — produced a margin of 3.94 percentage points. This was a substantial narrowing from the 9.45-point margin of the 2016 result and the second-narrowest re-election margin of any sitting Ghanaian president in the Fourth-Republic period (after Rawlings's 1996 14.4-point re-election, which had been wider, and the Mills 2008/Mahama 2012 sequences, which had been narrower in different ways). The Mahama campaign contested the result through a Supreme Court petition (Mahama v. Electoral Commission and Akufo-Addo, Writ No. J1/15/2020), filed on 30 December 2020 and dismissed unanimously on 4 March 2021 by a nine-judge panel presided by Chief Justice Kwasi Anin-Yeboah, on the grounds that the petition failed to set out a sufficient cause of action under the rules of evidence applicable to election petitions [TBD-VERIFY: the precise procedural reasoning of the 4 March 2021 Supreme Court dismissal — particularly the question of whether the dismissal turned on the petition's failure to plead the inclusion of allegedly inflated EC presidential-results figures or on the more fundamental question of the standard of pleading required — is variously characterised across the academic literature and the Ghana Law Reports of 2021; the canonical source is the Supreme Court's reasoned judgment of 4 March 2021].

3.2 The Parliamentary Hung Result

The parliamentary result was the structurally consequential outcome. The Electoral Commission certified 137 seats for the NPP, 137 seats for the NDC, and one independent (Andrew Asiamah Amoako, MP for Fomena, a former NPP MP who had been excluded from the NPP candidate list in 2020 and had contested as an independent) — a 137–137 hung result with the independent's preference being the swing factor in any major parliamentary division. This was the first hung parliament of the Fourth Republic (1992–) and produced an immediate structural constraint on the NPP government's legislative latitude. Akufo-Addo's second-term Cabinet, when fully constituted by mid-2021, would face a parliamentary environment in which no major legislation could be enacted without either the unified NPP vote with the independent's support, or some defection from the NDC; the dynamic of the 2021–2024 period — particularly visible in the e-Levy passage of 2022 — was conditioned by this arithmetic.

3.3 The 6–7 January 2021 Speakership Election

The most consequential procedural moment of the early second term was the 6–7 January 2021 Speakership election. Under Article 95 of the 1992 Constitution, the Speaker of Parliament is elected by the Members of Parliament at the inaugural sitting of each parliamentary cycle. The NPP nominee was Professor Mike Oquaye (the outgoing Seventh-Parliament Speaker); the NDC nominee was Alban Bagbin (the long-serving NDC MP for Nadowli-Kaleo and a former Majority Leader). The election was conducted by secret ballot during the inaugural sitting that began on the evening of 6 January 2021 and extended into the early hours of 7 January 2021. The procedural sequence produced multiple disputed moments — including disputes over the eligibility of selected MPs to vote, disputes over the procedure for the count, and confrontations on the floor of the chamber that required intervention by security personnel. The eventual count returned Bagbin elected by 138 votes to Oquaye's 136, with one rejected ballot [TBD-VERIFY: the precise final count of the 7 January 2021 Speakership election is recorded in the Parliament of Ghana Hansard of that date; press coverage from Daily Graphic, Joy News, and Citi Newsroom converges on a 138–136–1 outcome but the underlying explanation for the NPP shortfall — whether by NPP MP absence, by an NPP MP crossing over, or by the abstention of the independent — remains contested in post-2021 commentary]. Bagbin became the first Speaker of the Fourth Republic to be elected from the principal opposition party.

The Bagbin Speakership conditioned the parliamentary politics of the entire second term. The Speaker's procedural rulings on the November 2021 e-Levy debate, on the March 2022 e-Levy passage, on the December 2022 DDEP-period parliamentary politics, and on the 2023–2024 LGBT+ Bill passage were repeatedly contested by the NPP Majority leadership. The CDD-Ghana and IDEG democracy-and-governance briefings of 2021–2024 documented the Bagbin period as the most procedurally contested Speakership of the Fourth Republic to date.

3.4 The 7 January 2021 Inauguration

The 7 January 2021 inauguration at Black Star Square — held under significant COVID-19 protocols, with attendance restricted relative to the 2017 inauguration — produced the second-term inaugural address. Akufo-Addo committed the new administration to continued Free SHS funding, to a "GhanaCares Obaatan Pa" pandemic-recovery programme, to the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat in Accra (which had been operationalised in August 2020), and to a "build back better" framing of the post-COVID economic trajectory. The address did not signal the macroeconomic-trajectory deterioration that would become visible through 2021–2022; the post-2024 commentary has identified the gap between the post-COVID rhetoric of the inaugural and the underlying fiscal trajectory as one of the central political-economic-narrative failures of the second term.

The second-term Cabinet, announced in stages through January–March 2021, retained most of the principal first-term ministers in their portfolios: Ken Ofori-Atta continued as Minister of Finance; Mahamudu Bawumia continued as Vice President; Alan Kyerematen continued as Trade and Industry Minister (until his February 2024 resignation to contest the December 2024 election as an independent); Yaw Osafo-Maafo was elevated to Senior Presidential Adviser; Hawa Koomson took Special Initiatives; Matthew Opoku Prempeh moved from Education to Energy (signalling the post-2020 priority on the energy-sector legacy debt). The Cabinet size, at over 110 ministers and deputies when fully constituted, drew the same civil-society criticism on cost-of-government grounds that had attended the first-term Cabinet.

---

4. The 2021 Macroeconomic Baseline

4.1 The Inherited Fiscal Position

The 2021 macroeconomic baseline was substantially worse than the official-presentational frame allowed. Ghana had exited its 2015–2019 IMF ECF in April 2019 and had spent the post-exit period through 2020 in a "Ghana Beyond Aid" frame articulated in the April 2019 Charter and Strategy Document. The post-exit period had produced moderately positive macroeconomic indicators through 2019 — GDP growth of approximately 6.5%; headline inflation in single digits (7.9% in December 2019) for the first time in several years; a fiscal deficit of approximately 4.7% of GDP. The 2019 fiscal position had however 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.

The COVID-19 pandemic fiscal response (March 2020 – March 2022) had been the proximate accelerant of the post-2022 crisis. The FY 2020 budget, calibrated to a fiscal deficit of approximately 4.7% of GDP, had ended at 11.7% — the largest single-year fiscal expansion in post-1992 Ghanaian fiscal history. The drivers included the Coronavirus Alleviation Programme (launched April 2020); the free water and electricity provisions of April–December 2020; the ₵19 billion Ghana CARES "Obaatan Pa" Programme launched November 2020; COVID-19 vaccine procurement; and the parallel revenue-side collapse from the global slowdown. The FY 2021 fiscal deficit, at approximately 9.7% of GDP, had signalled that the FY 2020 expansion had not been a one-off shock but rather the new baseline.

4.2 The Debt-Stock Trajectory

Total public debt rose from approximately USD 41.4 billion (December 2020) to approximately USD 50.2 billion (December 2021) — a debt-to-GDP ratio of approximately 78–80% (the precise figure varied across measurement conventions). The composition was substantially external-skewed: external debt accounted for approximately USD 28 billion of the December 2021 stock; domestic debt accounted for approximately USD 22 billion (₵181 billion at end-2021 exchange rates). The external-debt composition included approximately USD 13.1 billion in Eurobonds, approximately USD 8 billion in multilateral debt (IMF, World Bank, AfDB), approximately USD 5 billion in bilateral debt (with China as the largest bilateral creditor at approximately USD 1.7 billion), and approximately USD 2 billion in commercial loans.

The 2021 Eurobond issuance was a particularly significant trajectory-marker. In March 2021, Ghana issued approximately USD 3.025 billion across three tranches — a 4-year zero-coupon tranche at USD 525 million, a 7-year tranche at USD 1.0 billion at 7.75%, a 12-year tranche at USD 1.0 billion at 8.625%, and a 20-year tranche at USD 500 million at 8.875% — at a weighted-average coupon substantially higher than the 2019 issuance (USD 3 billion at coupons of 7.875%–8.95%) and the 2020 issuance (USD 3 billion at coupons of 6.375%–8.95%). The rising coupon trajectory across the 2019–2020–2021 issuances reflected the cumulative deterioration in market perception of Ghana's debt-sustainability trajectory. The March 2021 issuance proved to be Ghana's last Eurobond access before the December 2022 default.

4.3 The IMF Article IV 2021 Consultation

The IMF Article IV Consultation of July 2021 (IMF Country Report No. 21/165, published July 2021) was the most consequential pre-crisis macroeconomic-diagnostic document. The Staff Report classified Ghana's debt position as "high risk of debt distress" — the highest risk classification on the IMF Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries (DSF-LIC) — and recommended fiscal-consolidation measures of approximately 5 percentage points of GDP across the medium term to restore debt sustainability. The recommended measures included: domestic-revenue mobilisation increases of approximately 1.5–2.0 percentage points of GDP; expenditure-rationalisation of approximately 2.0–2.5 percentage points of GDP; and structural reforms in revenue administration, public financial management, and state-owned-enterprise oversight.

The Akufo-Addo administration's public response to the July 2021 IMF Article IV — delivered through Ministry of Finance press releases and through selected Bawumia speeches in Q3 2021 — was that the recommendations were broadly aligned with the administration's own fiscal-policy intentions, but that the speed and scale of the recommended adjustment would be moderated by the post-COVID social-policy commitments and by the gradual normalisation of revenue performance. The fiscal-consolidation measures actually adopted through the 17 November 2021 Budget Statement (see Section 5) were substantially below the IMF-recommended scale — a gap that the post-2022 CDD-Ghana and IDEG briefings identified as a critical pre-crisis warning that the administration declined to act on at the recommended scale.

4.4 The Q3–Q4 2021 Market Signals

The Q3–Q4 2021 secondary-market signals on Ghana's Eurobonds and on the cedi-denominated bond markets had begun to register the deteriorating sustainability trajectory. The yield-to-maturity on Ghana's 10-year Eurobonds (the 2029 maturity issued in 2019) had widened from approximately 7.5% in early 2021 to approximately 11.0% by November 2021 — a spread over US Treasuries of approximately 700 basis points (from approximately 600 basis points in early 2021). The Ghana Stock Exchange Fixed-Income Market yields on the long-tenor cedi-denominated bonds had begun to widen in parallel. The credit-default-swap spreads on Ghana's sovereign debt, where they were quoted, had widened to levels indicating market expectations of substantially elevated default probability.

The fiscal-position market signals were therefore visible before the November 2021 Budget; the question of why the November 2021 Budget proceeded on the calibrations that it did — particularly the projected 7.4%-of-GDP deficit and the e-Levy revenue projections — has been one of the principal post-2022 governance-of-decision-making questions.

---

5. The November 2021 Budget and the e-Levy Controversy

5.1 The 17 November 2021 Budget Statement

The 17 November 2021 Budget Statement, delivered to Parliament by Minister of Finance Ken Ofori-Atta under the heading Building a Sustainable Entrepreneurial Nation: Fiscal Consolidation and Job Creation, was the central legislative-economic moment of the early second term. The Budget calibrated:

• A FY 2022 fiscal deficit of 7.4% of GDP — a narrowing from the FY 2021 9.7% outturn but well above the IMF-recommended consolidation trajectory;
• A GDP growth projection of approximately 5.5%;
• A headline-inflation projection of approximately 8% (against a Bank of Ghana medium-term target of 8 ± 2%);
• Domestic-revenue mobilisation increases of approximately 1.5 percentage points of GDP, anchored by the proposed Electronic Transaction Levy (e-Levy);
• Continued Eurobond market access for the FY 2022 financing requirement of approximately USD 3 billion.

Each calibration proved unsustainable. The e-Levy revenue projection — approximately ₵6.9 billion in FY 2022, calculated on a 1.75% levy on electronic transactions above ₵100 — would underperform by approximately 85–90% across FY 2022. The Eurobond market access would close in March 2022. The GDP-growth projection would be revised down through 2022 to approximately 3.1% (the FY 2022 outturn). The inflation projection would be exceeded by approximately 4,500 basis points by December 2022.

5.2 The e-Levy Proposal

The e-Levy was the Budget's principal new revenue measure. The proposal was a 1.75% ad valorem levy on electronic financial transactions above ₵100, applicable to mobile-money transfers (the principal target), bank transfers, point-of-sale transactions, and merchant payments. The proposal exempted: transactions below the ₵100 threshold; salary payments to bank accounts; payments to government for taxes and statutory obligations; and selected categories of inter-bank settlement. The projected revenue of ₵6.9 billion across FY 2022 was calculated on an assumption that mobile-money transaction volumes (which had grown rapidly through the COVID-19 period, reaching approximately ₵986 billion in 2021 across the major MTN, Vodafone Cash, and AirtelTigo Money platforms) would continue their growth trajectory through 2022 without behavioural substitution into untaxed channels.

The Ministry of Finance frame for the e-Levy emphasised three rationales: (i) the need to broaden the tax base into the rapidly growing digital-economy sector; (ii) the equity rationale that mobile-money transactions had been previously untaxed while equivalent commercial transactions through traditional banking channels had been subject to selected tax obligations; (iii) the fiscal rationale that the projected revenue would substantially close the FY 2022 financing requirement without requiring more painful expenditure-cuts to social-policy commitments (particularly Free SHS, the National Health Insurance Scheme, and the LEAP cash-transfer programme).

5.3 The Minority NDC Contestation

The Minority NDC's contestation of the e-Levy was sustained, multi-front, and procedurally innovative across the November 2021 – May 2022 period. The Minority's substantive critique developed three principal arguments. First, the e-Levy would impose a regressive distributional incidence on lower-income mobile-money users who had no realistic substitution channels — a critique substantially endorsed by CDD-Ghana, IMANI, and selected academic analyses. Second, the projected revenue was substantially over-stated because behavioural substitution into cash transactions and into below-threshold structured transactions would erode the tax base. Third, the e-Levy's underlying procedural sequence — its inclusion in the Budget without sufficient prior public consultation, its inclusion in the Appropriation Bill rather than as standalone legislation, and the timing of its passage — violated the spirit of parliamentary deliberative norms.

The Minority's procedural contestation produced a sequence of consequential parliamentary moments:

• 30 November 2021: The Minority walked out of the Budget approval vote, arguing that the procedural quorum had not been properly established under Standing Order 109. The Majority subsequently voted to approve the Budget in principle without the Minority present; the Speaker (Bagbin, an NDC member) was abroad on medical leave and the First Deputy Speaker (Joseph Osei-Owusu, NPP) had presided. The validity of the procedural sequence was subsequently contested at the Supreme Court in Justice Abdulai v. Attorney General (decided March 2022), in which the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the constitutional validity of the Deputy Speaker's procedural conduct.

• 21 December 2021: The chamber-floor altercation between Majority and Minority MPs (over the propriety of voting on the Appropriation Bill in the Speaker's absence) became one of the most-photographed parliamentary moments of the post-1992 period. The episode produced injury to selected MPs and required intervention by Parliamentary security. The Bagbin Speakership subsequently issued a public condemnation of the altercation and committed to procedural reforms; the underlying procedural disputes continued through 2022.

• March 2022: The e-Levy Bill was debated as standalone legislation. The Minority walked out of the second reading on 29 March 2022. The Bill was passed on 29 March 2022 by 136–0 in the Minority's absence, at a reduced rate of 1.5% (down from the original 1.75%) and with broadened exemptions [TBD-VERIFY: the exact roll-call vote on the 29 March 2022 e-Levy passage, the question of whether the procedural quorum was constitutionally sufficient, and the timing of selected NPP MPs' arrival are recorded in the Hansard of that date].

5.4 The May 2022 Implementation and Revenue Performance

The e-Levy implementation began on 1 May 2022. The early-implementation data — collected by the Ghana Revenue Authority and reported through the Mid-Year Fiscal Policy Review of July 2022 — showed substantial revenue under-performance. Cumulative e-Levy revenue through end-June 2022 was approximately ₵94 million against a pro-rated target of approximately ₵2.3 billion — an under-performance of approximately 96%. The FY 2022 full-year e-Levy revenue, at approximately ₵614 million against the original ₵6.9 billion projection, represented an underperformance of approximately 91%.

The drivers of the underperformance, identified in the IMF May 2023 Staff Report and in the CDD-Ghana / IMANI analyses, were threefold. First, substantial behavioural substitution out of mobile-money into cash transactions — the MTN Mobile Money platform recorded a decline in total transaction volume of approximately 12% across May–December 2022 against the pre-implementation trend, with substantial substitution into below-₵100 structured transactions. Second, the structural-administration complications of the e-Levy implementation, including substantial dispute over which transaction categories were properly taxable. Third, the cumulative inflation-and-cedi-depreciation impact on real transaction values across 2022, which compounded the volume decline.

The e-Levy underperformance was both a fiscal-revenue failure and a political-economic credibility failure. The Ministry of Finance's projections — defended through 2021 against substantial civil-society and Minority contestation — had been substantially wrong. The post-2022 commentary identified the e-Levy episode as one of the central political-economic-credibility losses that conditioned the subsequent 2024 campaign.

---

6. The 2022 Cedi-and-Inflation Cascade

6.1 The External Trigger — March 2022 US Federal Reserve Tightening

The 2022 cedi cascade was triggered by an external shock that converted underlying domestic vulnerability into a full-spectrum sovereign-debt crisis. The 16 March 2022 US Federal Reserve decision to begin its post-COVID tightening cycle — the initial 25-basis-point increase in the Federal Funds Rate, followed by 50 basis points in May, 75 basis points in June, and continuing increases through Q3–Q4 2022 — closed Eurobond market access for the entire sub-Saharan African sovereign cluster within approximately three weeks. 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).

The closure of Eurobond market access removed the principal source of external-debt-service financing on which the 2021 fiscal architecture had been built. The cumulative FY 2022 financing requirement of approximately USD 3.0 billion in external borrowing had no alternative single source of comparable scale; the cumulative drawdown on Bank of Ghana reserves and on multilateral disbursements through 2022 could not bridge the full requirement.

6.2 The Russia–Ukraine Commodity Shock

The 24 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 through Q1–Q2 2022 (with positive implications for Ghana's gold-export revenues); but wheat prices and refined-petroleum prices rose sharply (Ghana being 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 inflation-channel effects were however materially negative. The rise in global petroleum prices (Brent crude rising from approximately USD 90 per barrel in January 2022 to peaks above USD 120 per barrel in March–June 2022) transmitted into Ghanaian domestic-petroleum prices through the National Petroleum Authority's pricing-window architecture; the cumulative effect on transport costs, on food-prices through the supply-chain, and on headline inflation through Q2–Q3 2022 was substantial. The wheat-price impact transmitted into bread, pastry, and pasta prices, contributing to the food-inflation component that rose particularly sharply through 2022.

6.3 The Cedi-Depreciation Sequence

The cedi-dollar interbank exchange rate, which had stood at approximately ¢6.10/USD in January 2022, depreciated progressively through the year on a self-reinforcing cycle:

• End-January 2022: ¢6.27/USD
• End-February 2022: ¢6.78/USD (post-Russia–Ukraine invasion adjustment)
• End-March 2022: ¢7.10/USD (post-US Fed first hike, Eurobond market closure)
• End-April 2022: ¢7.50/USD (e-Levy passage uncertainty effects)
• End-May 2022: ¢7.85/USD
• End-June 2022: ¢8.10/USD
• End-July 2022: ¢8.30/USD (post-Akufo-Addo IMF announcement)
• End-August 2022: ¢9.60/USD
• End-September 2022: ¢10.20/USD
• End-October 2022: ¢12.00/USD
• End-November 2022: ¢14.50/USD
• End-December 2022: ¢12.00/USD (post-DDEP-launch partial recovery)

The cumulative eleven-month depreciation through November 2022 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 (GH-B-03). The post-DDEP-launch partial recovery in December 2022, to approximately ¢12.00/USD, reflected the initial market response to the announcement that a debt-restructuring framework was forthcoming.

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 were the textbook signature of a balance-of-payments crisis converting into a sovereign-debt crisis.

6.4 The Bank of Ghana Monetary-Policy Response

The Bank of Ghana under Governor Dr Ernest Addison undertook a sustained monetary-tightening response through 2022 that was insufficient on its own to restore exchange-rate stability. The Monetary Policy Committee sequence of Policy Rate actions across 2022:

• January 2022: 14.5% (holding from late 2021)
• March 2022: 17.0% (+250 bps, post-US Fed first hike)
• May 2022: 19.0% (+200 bps)
• August 2022: 22.0% (+300 bps, post-cedi acceleration)
• October 2022: 24.5% (+250 bps)
• November 2022: 27.0% (+250 bps, ahead of December DDEP)

The cumulative 1,250-basis-point increase in eleven months was the largest single-year tightening cycle in the Bank of Ghana's post-1957 history. The MPC press releases through 2022 — signed by Governor Addison and reflecting the consensus of the committee — emphasised inflation-expectations anchoring and balance-of-payments-stability objectives. The effectiveness of the tightening was however structurally limited by the depth of the underlying fiscal pressure; without the fiscal-side adjustment that the DDEP would eventually deliver, monetary tightening alone could not restore equilibrium.

6.5 The Inflation Trajectory

Headline inflation (the Ghana Statistical Service Consumer Price Index, year-on-year) rose through 2022 on a trajectory that exceeded all forecasting expectations:

• January 2022: 13.9%
• March 2022: 19.4%
• June 2022: 29.8%
• July 2022: 31.7%
• September 2022: 37.2%
• October 2022: 40.4%
• November 2022: 50.3%
• December 2022: 54.1%

The December 2022 reading of 54.1% was the highest headline-inflation rate since 1995 (when the post-PNDC stabilisation programme had still been working through the Economic Recovery Programme legacy and the 1994–1995 currency-and-fiscal shock). The disaggregated composition was particularly punishing: food inflation reached 59.7% in December 2022; non-food inflation reached 49.9%; transport inflation, driven by the cumulative petroleum-price-and-cedi-depreciation pass-through, reached 71.4%; housing-and-utilities inflation reached 81.7%.

The cumulative consumer-price increase across 2021–2022 alone was approximately 70%; the cumulative increase across the 2021–2024 second-term period was approximately 130%. The political-economic effect on household real incomes was substantial and substantially unrecovered by nominal-wage adjustments. The CDD-Ghana Afrobarometer Round 9 fieldwork (April–May 2022) and Round 10 fieldwork (May–June 2024) tracked cost-of-living as the dominant electoral concern across both rounds, with the share of respondents identifying it as the "most important problem facing the country" rising from approximately 31% in mid-2022 to approximately 53% in mid-2024.

6.6 The Reserves Drawdown

The Bank of Ghana's foreign-exchange-reserves drawdown through 2022 was the proximate quantitative indicator of the balance-of-payments-crisis trajectory. Gross international reserves (the headline measure including encumbered reserves and gold) declined from approximately USD 9.7 billion (end-2021) to approximately USD 6.6 billion (end-Q2 2022) to approximately USD 6.1 billion (end-Q3 2022) to approximately USD 6.2 billion (end-2022). The narrower measure of net international reserves (excluding encumbered reserves and selected gold holdings) declined more steeply, reaching a trough that has been variously reported as approximately USD 1.5 billion in October 2022 [TBD-VERIFY: the precise net-international-reserves position in October 2022 is variously reported across Bank of Ghana statistical bulletins and IMF Country Reports; the IMF May 2023 Staff Report (Country Report No. 23/168) records the canonical programme-baseline figure].

The reserves trajectory through 2022 had reached a level at which standard import-cover ratios (the BOP-precautionary measure of reserves in months of merchandise import cover) had fallen below the conventional three-months-of-imports floor by mid-2022; by Q4 2022 the headline-measure import cover was approximately 2.5 months and the narrower net measure was substantially below one month. The reserves position was therefore the proximate trigger for the November 2022 framework decisions that produced the December 2022 announcements.

---

7. The Path to Default — July–December 2022

7.1 The 1 July 2022 Akufo-Addo IMF-Announcement Address

The 1 July 2022 Akufo-Addo address to the nation — broadcast on the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and the major private networks — was the formal reversal of the post-2019 "Ghana Beyond Aid" trajectory. The address announced the government's decision to seek IMF support and framed the decision as a response to the "exogenous shocks" of COVID-19 (which had produced the FY 2020 fiscal expansion) and the post-February 2022 Russia–Ukraine commodity-and-monetary-tightening environment. The address did not detail the specific contours of the IMF programme that would be sought; that work would proceed through the July–November 2022 staff-level engagement.

The 1 July 2022 address was a moment of substantial political-rhetorical reversal. The "Ghana Beyond Aid" frame, articulated in the April 2019 Charter, had been the signature macroeconomic-rhetorical posture of the first term and the early second term; the post-2019 IMF-exit had been framed as a substantive achievement and as the foundation for a post-IMF Ghanaian fiscal-policy trajectory. The reversal in July 2022 — and the parallel rhetorical pivot from the "Beyond Aid" frame to the "exogenous shocks" frame — was identified across CDD-Ghana, IDEG, and IMANI commentary as one of the central political-economic-credibility losses of the second term.

7.2 The July–November 2022 IMF Staff-Level Engagement

The IMF Mission to Accra in July 2022, under Mission Chief Stéphane Roudet, opened the staff-level engagement that would produce the eventual May 2023 ECF programme. The staff-level engagement proceeded through a series of subsequent technical missions through Q3 2022 — including the August 2022 mission, the September–October 2022 mission, and the November 2022 mission — covering the structural-debt-sustainability analysis, the programme-design parameters, and the conditionality framework.

The key analytical conclusion of the staff-level engagement, embedded in the eventual programme architecture, was that the Ghanaian debt trajectory was unsustainable on its prevailing path and that programme conditionality would require both a fiscal-consolidation pathway and a debt-restructuring component. The specific contours of the debt-restructuring component — including the question of whether the restructuring would cover both domestic and external debt, the question of the appropriate present-value-haircut target, and the question of the sequencing between domestic and external restructuring — were the principal technical-design questions of the August–November 2022 period.

7.3 The 24 November 2022 Mid-Year Fiscal Policy Review

The Mid-Year Fiscal Policy Review presented to Parliament on 24 November 2022 by Minister of Finance Ken Ofori-Atta (formally the Supplementary Estimates and Mid-Year Fiscal Policy Review of the 2022 Budget Statement) outlined the framework of fiscal-consolidation measures and the broad architecture of the planned debt-restructuring. The Review acknowledged the substantial deterioration in fiscal indicators across 2022:

• The FY 2022 fiscal deficit was projected to reach approximately 9.9% of GDP (against the November 2021 Budget calibration of 7.4%);
• Public-debt was projected to reach approximately 105% of GDP by end-2022 on the cedi-depreciation-adjusted measurement (against the December 2021 level of 78–80%);
• The e-Levy revenue underperformance and the broader domestic-revenue-mobilisation shortfall were acknowledged;
• A framework of fiscal-consolidation measures, including expenditure rationalisation and selected revenue-administration improvements, was outlined.

The Review did not however specify the DDEP terms; those would be announced on 5 December 2022. The Mid-Year Review was the last major public-fiscal-policy statement before the DDEP launch and the external default.

7.4 The November–December 2022 Framework Decisions

The November–December 2022 framework decisions that produced the DDEP and the external-default announcements were taken within a small group of Ministry of Finance and Bank of Ghana decision-makers — principally Minister Ofori-Atta, Vice President Bawumia (in his Economic Management Team chair capacity), Governor Addison, the Ministry of Finance Chief Director, and the Bank of Ghana Deputy Governors — in close coordination with the IMF mission team and with external legal-and-financial advisers including Lazard (financial advisor on the external-debt restructuring) and Hogan Lovells (legal counsel) [TBD-VERIFY: the specific composition of the November–December 2022 Cabinet sub-committee that approved the DDEP terms, the specific roles of Vice President Bawumia and the Economic Management Team in the framework decisions, and the timing of selected Cabinet briefings are variously reported across Daily Graphic, Joy News, and post-2024 commentary; the canonical source would be the Cabinet minutes and Ministry of Finance internal records, which are not in the public domain].

The framework decisions reached by late November 2022 included:

• A decision to proceed with a domestic-debt restructuring of substantial scale, structured as a voluntary exchange but with terms that would produce material present-value loss for participating bondholders;
• A decision to suspend debt-service payments on certain external commercial debt and on the non-Paris-Club bilateral debt of selected creditors, formalising the external-default position;
• A decision to seek the IMF programme under the Extended Credit Facility, with programme conditionality including the debt-restructuring trajectory;
• A decision to proceed with the external-debt restructuring under the G20 Common Framework architecture, with bilateral-debt restructuring negotiated through an Official Creditor Committee and commercial-debt restructuring negotiated through a Bondholder Steering Committee.

The framework decisions were not subject to public parliamentary consultation in advance of the 5 December 2022 and 19 December 2022 announcements; the post-2022 commentary has identified the absence of advance parliamentary deliberation as one of the central political-economic-process critiques of the DDEP architecture.

---

8. The 5 December 2022 DDEP Launch and the December 2022 – February 2023 Renegotiation

8.1 The 5 December 2022 Announcement

The 5 December 2022 Domestic Debt Exchange Programme announcement at the Ministry of Finance press conference — delivered by Minister of Finance Ken Ofori-Atta in the presence of Bank of Ghana representatives — 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 six principal investor categories: individual investors (approximately 8% of the total stock); pension funds and Tier-2 SSNIT-administered funds (approximately 12%); banks (approximately 32%); insurance companies (approximately 6%); collective investment schemes (approximately 4%); the Bank of Ghana (approximately 30%); and other categories (approximately 8%).

The original-terms-proposal had four principal elements: an exchange of all eligible bonds for a menu of new instruments featuring zero coupons through FY 2023; gradually rising coupons of 5–10% by 2025–2027; tenors extending to 2032 and 2033 (against the original tenors that had been substantially shorter); and no nominal-principal haircut but substantial present-value loss through coupon compression and tenor extension. The Programme's launch documentation included an Exchange Memorandum (the formal legal-and-financial document detailing the original-terms exchange offer) and a parallel set of accompanying procedural arrangements through the Ghana Securities Industry Association and the Securities and Exchange Commission of Ghana.

The launch was met within forty-eight hours by sustained civil-society and bondholder opposition. The cumulative response across the December 2022 – February 2023 period produced material design modifications.

8.2 The Pensioners Association of Ghana 27 December 2022 Picket

The Pensioners Association of Ghana — the umbrella organisation representing approximately 200,000 retired Ghanaian public-sector and selected private-sector pensioners — emerged as the most-visible civil-society opponent of the DDEP's original terms. The Association's central concern was that the original terms would impose substantial present-value loss on pension-fund holdings that were ultimately attributable to individual pensioners' lifetime contributions; that the coupon-compression-and-tenor-extension architecture would substantially erode the real value of pension benefits across the affected tenor period; and that the exemption of the Bank of Ghana from the original terms reflected an inequitable distributional choice.

The Association's 27 December 2022 picket at the Ministry of Finance — a sustained physical demonstration outside the Ministry's headquarters in central Accra — became the most-photographed civil-society event of the DDEP-period. The picket continued across multiple days through end-December 2022 and into early January 2023; the Association's parallel public letter to President Akufo-Addo on 28 December 2022 set out the substantive concerns in formal terms and requested an audience that the Presidency did not initially grant.

The Association's pressure produced the first design modifications. On 5 January 2023, the Ministry of Finance announced selected modifications including (i) the exemption of individual bondholders with aggregate holdings below ₵25,000 from the Programme; (ii) selected coupon-protection adjustments for pension-fund holdings; (iii) the extension of the bondholder consent deadline to allow for further negotiation. These first modifications were not however considered sufficient by the Pensioners Association or by the parallel Ghana Individual Bondholders Forum that had begun to organise during late December 2022.

8.3 The Ghana Individual Bondholders Forum

The Ghana Individual Bondholders Forum (GIBF) — formed in the second half of December 2022 by a coalition of individual investors holding cedi-denominated bonds — became the second principal civil-society opponent of the DDEP. The Forum's membership encompassed approximately 70,000 individual investors holding cumulative bond positions of approximately ₵15–20 billion (against the original-terms total of ₵137 billion). The Forum's leadership included financial-sector professionals and retired senior public servants with both the analytical capacity to engage the technical terms of the DDEP and the institutional standing to engage the Ministry of Finance through formal channels.

The GIBF's critique paralleled that of the Pensioners Association on the distributional-incidence question but added two distinctive dimensions. First, the constitutional-property-rights argument: that the original DDEP terms constituted a breach of the constitutional protection of private property under Article 18 of the 1992 Constitution and an effective expropriation without compensation that should be tested in the Supreme Court. Second, the contract-law argument: that the original bond contracts had been issued under explicit Ministry of Finance guarantees and that the DDEP's coupon-compression-and-tenor-extension architecture constituted a unilateral modification of contractual terms that could not be enforced through a voluntary-exchange architecture without genuine consent.

The GIBF coordinated with the Pensioners Association and with the Financial Stability Concerned Citizens Coalition through the December 2022 – February 2023 negotiation period. The coordinated civil-society pressure produced the eventual modifications embedded in the 31 January 2023 Amended and Restated Offer.

8.4 The 31 January 2023 Amended and Restated Offer

The 31 January 2023 Amended and Restated Offer — issued by the Ministry of Finance following the cumulative December 2022 – January 2023 negotiation pressure — was the principal design-modification of the DDEP. The amended terms exempted individual bondholders below specified thresholds (raised from the initial ₵25,000 in aggregate holdings to a broader threshold structure); introduced modified terms for pension funds (reduced haircut, selected coupon protection through the early-tenor years, and limited principal-protection mechanisms); and created the Ghana Financial Stability Fund (operationalised through World Bank co-financing of approximately USD 750 million) to address bank and insurance recapitalisation costs.

The amended terms maintained the basic architecture of the original Programme — the voluntary-exchange structure, the tenor-extension to 2032–2033, the broad coupon-compression — but reshaped the distributional-incidence at the margin to address the most-acute civil-society concerns. The amended-terms documentation also extended the Programme's bondholder-consent deadline to allow for further negotiation through early February 2023.

8.5 The 14 February 2023 Settlement

The DDEP's bondholder-consent deadline closed on 14 February 2023 with approximately 85% participation among eligible bondholders. The participation breakdown across investor categories (as reported in the IMF May 2023 Staff Report and in subsequent Bank of Ghana publications) was approximately: banks 90%; insurance companies 88%; pension funds 65%; collective investment schemes 80%; individual investors (above the exemption threshold) approximately 50%; the Bank of Ghana 100% (as originally specified) [TBD-VERIFY: the precise participation breakdown across investor categories at the 14 February 2023 settlement is variously reported across IMF, World Bank, Ministry of Finance, and Bank of Ghana sources; the canonical source is the Ministry of Finance Final Settlement Report of February 2023].

The 85% aggregate participation rate produced an estimated interest-savings stream of approximately ₵61 billion through the 2024–2027 period — the central debt-sustainability building block within the IMF programme architecture that would subsequently be approved on 17 May 2023. The Programme's 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.

8.6 The 19 December 2022 External Default Announcement

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. The announcement framed the suspension as an "interim emergency measure" pending the negotiation of a comprehensive external-debt restructuring; the legal-technical framing was that the suspension was a unilateral standstill rather than a formal repudiation, but the credit-rating-agency treatment was the question.

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 downgraded Ghana to Ca in February 2023; S&P Global downgraded to SD (Selective Default) in December 2022. The cumulative sovereign-credit position through the period 2022–2024 was the lowest in Ghanaian post-independence history.

The 19 December 2022 announcement was politically less-visible than the 5 December 2022 DDEP announcement — in part because the immediate domestic political-economic effect was indirect (Ghanaian retail investors held only modest direct positions in the affected external instruments), in part because the Christmas-period news cycle absorbed the formal announcement with less sustained civil-society response. The longer-run political-economic effect was however substantial, particularly through the credit-rating-and-borrowing-cost trajectory of 2023–2024.

---

9. The IMF ECF Approval and the 2023–2024 Macroeconomic Adjustment

9.1 The 17 May 2023 IMF Executive Board Approval

The 17 May 2023 IMF Executive Board approval of the 36-month USD 3 billion Extended Credit Facility arrangement was the structural anchor of the post-default macroeconomic adjustment. The Programme — Ghana's seventeenth IMF programme since independence and the third programme of the post-2009 period — was approved at the Executive Board on the basis of the Staff Report (IMF Country Report No. 23/168, May 2023). The 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 Programme's three-pillar structural architecture was: (i) fiscal consolidation aimed at restoring debt sustainability, with a primary-balance trajectory targeting a surplus of 0.5% of GDP by FY 2024 and continued surplus thereafter; (ii) structural reforms to enhance domestic revenue mobilisation (broadening the tax base, strengthening revenue administration, addressing tax expenditures) and to reduce expenditure rigidities (public-sector wage-bill management, energy-sector tariff adjustment, state-owned-enterprise reform); (iii) exchange-rate-and-monetary-policy reforms to anchor inflation expectations and restore the operational integrity of the inflation-targeting framework.

The Programme's quantitative performance criteria (QPCs) — the binding quarterly targets against which programme performance would be assessed at the periodic Reviews — included: a primary-balance commitment to a fiscal surplus of 0.5% of GDP for FY 2024 (the first primary surplus since 2014); a ceiling on net domestic financing of the central government; a floor on net international reserves; a zero ceiling on new external non-concessional borrowing during the programme period; a ceiling on new external arrears.

9.2 The Inflation Trajectory 2023–2024

The 2023–2024 disinflation trajectory under the ECF was substantial:

• December 2022: 54.1% (peak)
• March 2023: 45.0%
• June 2023: 42.5%
• September 2023: 38.1%
• December 2023: 23.2%
• March 2024: 25.8%
• June 2024: 22.8%
• September 2024: 21.5%
• November 2024: 23.8%

The cumulative disinflation from 54.1% (December 2022) to 23.2% (December 2023) — a decline of approximately 3,100 basis points in twelve months — was the steepest single-year disinflation in Ghanaian post-independence history. The drivers were threefold: the Bank of Ghana's monetary tightening (the 30.0% Policy Rate peak held March 2023 – August 2024); the cedi stabilisation (which reduced the imported-inflation channel); the gradual easing of global commodity-price pressures through 2023.

The 2024 trajectory however showed disinflation stalling at the 22–24% range — substantially above the Bank of Ghana medium-term target of 8 ± 2%. The cumulative consumer-price increase across 2021–2024 of approximately 130% on the headline CPI was substantially un-recovered by nominal-wage adjustments. The household-survey-data through 2024 indicated continuing real-income compression. The CDD-Ghana Afrobarometer Round 10 fieldwork (May–June 2024) tracked cost-of-living as the dominant electoral concern, with approximately 53% of respondents identifying it as the "most important problem facing the country" — the highest level recorded in the Afrobarometer Ghana series.

9.3 The Cedi Stabilisation 2023–2024

The cedi-dollar interbank exchange rate stabilised in the ¢14.0–¢15.5/USD range through 2023 and 2024 — a substantial recovery from the November 2022 ¢14.50/USD peak but a sustained loss of approximately 60–65% against the January 2022 ¢6.10/USD baseline. The detailed trajectory:

• End-2022: ¢12.00/USD (post-DDEP partial recovery)
• End-Q1 2023: ¢11.50/USD
• End-Q2 2023: ¢11.40/USD
• End-Q3 2023: ¢11.85/USD
• End-2023: ¢12.00/USD
• End-Q1 2024: ¢13.30/USD
• End-Q2 2024: ¢14.85/USD
• End-Q3 2024: ¢15.65/USD
• End-2024: ¢14.70/USD (after Eurobond exchange completion)

The cedi stabilisation was driven by the IMF disbursements (cumulative reserves-building); the recovery of the Bank of Ghana's reserves position; the partial recovery of remittance and tourism inflows; and the disciplined Foreign Exchange Auctions architecture introduced through 2023. The 2024 mid-year softening — to the ¢15.65/USD trough in September 2024 — reflected the seasonal-import-pressure dynamics and the cumulative Eurobond-exchange-uncertainty effects of Q3 2024; the post-November 2024 recovery to ¢14.70/USD reflected the Eurobond-exchange completion and the parallel pre-election reserves-building.

9.4 The Reserves Recovery

Gross international reserves (the headline measure including encumbered reserves and gold) recovered from the October 2022 trough to approximately USD 8.9 billion (October 2024). The trajectory was substantially supported by the IMF disbursements (approximately USD 2.4 billion cumulative through April 2025), by the parallel World Bank Development Policy Operation disbursements (approximately USD 750 million cumulative through 2023–2024), by the recovery of merchandise-export earnings (particularly gold, which benefited from the global price increase), and by the recovery of remittance inflows.

The narrower net-international-reserves measure (excluding encumbered reserves and selected gold holdings) recovered more slowly but reached an estimated USD 4.8 billion by October 2024 — substantially above the October 2022 trough but still below the pre-2022 levels. The reserves position by end-2024 had restored the BOP-precautionary import-cover ratio to approximately 4.0 months on the headline measure and approximately 2.5 months on the narrower measure.

9.5 The Primary Fiscal Balance Recovery

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 trajectory:

• FY 2022: −4.3% of GDP (deficit)
• FY 2023: −0.3% of GDP (deficit)
• FY 2024 outturn: +0.3% of GDP (surplus, first since 2014)

The FY 2024 primary-surplus achievement met the IMF programme quantitative performance criterion for the FY 2024 period and was the principal headline-fiscal-policy achievement of the second term's final year. The drivers were both revenue-side (a substantial domestic-revenue-mobilisation improvement under the 2023–2024 ECF conditionality, including the introduction of selected new revenue measures and the strengthening of revenue administration through the Ghana Revenue Authority modernisation) and expenditure-side (the cumulative effects of the DDEP-driven interest-payment reduction, the public-sector wage-bill containment, and the energy-sector subsidy rationalisation).

9.6 The Bank of Ghana Policy Rate Sequence

The Bank of Ghana Monetary Policy Committee 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 sequence:

• November 2022: 27.0%
• March 2023: 29.5% (+250 bps)
• May 2023: 29.5% (hold)
• July 2023: 30.0% (+50 bps, peak)
• September 2023: 30.0% (hold)
• November 2023: 30.0% (hold)
• January 2024: 29.0% (-100 bps, first easing in 22 months)
• March 2024: 29.0% (hold)
• May 2024: 29.0% (hold)
• July 2024: 29.0% (hold)
• September 2024: 27.0% (-200 bps)
• November 2024: 27.0% (hold)

The cumulative monetary-tightening cycle from January 2022 (14.5%) through the July 2023 peak (30.0%) of 1,550 basis points across 18 months was unprecedented in Ghanaian post-1957 history. The modest easing through 2024 reflected the cumulative disinflation progress but maintained substantially restrictive real rates throughout the year.

---

10. The External Debt Restructuring 2023–2024

10.1 The G20 Common Framework Architecture

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. Ghana was the third Common Framework case to formally engage the architecture (after Chad in 2021 and Zambia in 2022) and the third case to reach a final bilateral agreement (after Chad in 2022 and Zambia in 2023). The procedural-architecture of the Framework — particularly the role of China as co-chair, the comparability-of-treatment principle as between official-bilateral creditors and private creditors, and the IMF debt-sustainability framework as the analytical anchor — has been a substantial topic of international-financial-policy commentary.

10.2 The Bilateral-Debt Phase

The bilateral-debt phase proceeded through the formation of an Official Creditor Committee co-chaired by China and France in June 2023. The Committee's membership included the principal Ghanaian bilateral creditors — China (approximately USD 1.7 billion of bilateral debt, the largest single bilateral creditor), France, Japan, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, India, Saudi Arabia, and selected others. The Committee's work proceeded through 2023 on the analytical basis of the IMF debt-sustainability framework and on the principle of comparability-of-treatment as between official-bilateral creditors and the planned commercial-debt restructuring.

The preliminary Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed on 12 January 2024 — approximately seven months after the Committee's formation. The MOU covered approximately USD 5.4 billion of bilateral debt with restructuring terms providing for: tenor extensions (typically 10–15 years); partial principal reductions (variable across creditor categories); reduced interest rates (typically to concessional or near-concessional levels); and selected grace periods. The MOU was a "framework agreement" requiring subsequent bilateral implementation agreements with each creditor.

The final bilateral agreement was signed on 11 June 2024 — approximately five months after the MOU. The 11 June 2024 final agreement consolidated the bilateral terms across the Committee membership and triggered the subsequent commercial-debt-restructuring "comparability of treatment" determination. The completion of the bilateral phase six months before the December 2024 election was a politically consequential pre-election fiscal-policy moment.

10.3 The Commercial-Debt Phase

The commercial-debt phase, covering approximately USD 13.1 billion of Eurobond principal across approximately fifteen outstanding Eurobond issuances (issued across the 2007–2021 period at coupons ranging from 6.375% to 10.75%), was conducted with a Bondholder Steering Committee through 2023–2024. The Steering Committee was formed in mid-2023 and represented the principal holders of Ghana's outstanding Eurobonds — including emerging-market sovereign-debt-focused asset managers, selected hedge funds, and selected institutional investors with substantial Ghana Eurobond positions.

The negotiation through 2023 and into 2024 was extended and at times contentious. The principal issues were: (i) the present-value-haircut target (the Ministry of Finance and IMF initially sought a present-value haircut of approximately 40–45%; the Bondholder Steering Committee initially countered with approximately 25–30%); (ii) the post-restructuring coupon levels (the trade-off between front-loaded coupon protection and back-loaded principal-protection); (iii) the tenor extensions (the trade-off between earlier-maturity instruments and longer-tenor instruments); (iv) the comparability-of-treatment determination relative to the bilateral agreement.

The 3 October 2024 Exchange Offer was launched after extended negotiations and a formal "comparability of treatment" determination relative to the 11 June 2024 bilateral agreement. The Offer's terms included new Eurobond instruments at coupons ranging from 5.0% to 6.4%, with tenors extending to 2030, 2035, and beyond. The Offer's structure included two principal exchange options — a "PAR" option (lower coupon, longer tenor, smaller nominal-principal reduction) and a "DISCOUNT" option (higher coupon, intermediate tenor, larger nominal-principal reduction) — with bondholders able to elect across the options subject to allocation constraints.

The Offer closed on 6 November 2024 with approximately 95% participation across the eligible Eurobond stock. The exchange terms produced an estimated present-value haircut of approximately 37%. New instruments were issued in late November 2024 at the negotiated coupons and tenors. 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.

10.4 The Political-Timing Question

The political-timing question — whether the Eurobond-exchange completion in early November 2024, two weeks before the 7 December 2024 election, was a deliberate pre-election political-economic choice or simply the technically-determined sequence of the underlying negotiation — has been one of the principal post-event commentary questions. The Ministry of Finance position was that the timing reflected the technical-negotiation sequence and the IMF-programme conditionality timeline; the post-2024 NDC framing was that the completion was deliberately accelerated to position the NPP campaign on a "macroeconomic-stabilisation-achieved" narrative.

The Bondholder Steering Committee subsequent commentary (through 2025) has emphasised the technical-determinative dimension; the IMF's Third Review Staff Report (December 2024) recorded the completion without political-timing commentary. The post-2024 commentary across CDD-Ghana, IDEG, and IMANI has noted the political-economic effect of the timing without attributing definitive intentionality.

10.5 The Comparative-Sub-Saharan-African Context

The Ghanaian Eurobond Exchange was the third Eurobond restructuring of the post-2020 sub-Saharan African cluster, after Zambia (which completed its Eurobond Exchange in mid-2024) and concurrent with Sri Lanka's parallel 2023–2024 trajectory (which concluded in late 2024). The cumulative case — the Ghana DDEP and Eurobond Exchange taken together — 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.

---

11. The Parallel Scandal and Controversy Record

11.1 The 2021 Agyapa Minerals Royalty Deal

The Agyapa minerals royalty deal — proposed by the Akufo-Addo administration in 2020 and contested through 2020–2021 — was a financial-engineering structure to monetise future gold-royalty streams through a Jersey-incorporated special-purpose vehicle (Agyapa Royalties Limited). The structure would have transferred to Agyapa the rights to approximately 75% of Ghana's future gold-royalty receipts from selected mining concessions, in exchange for an upfront capital injection (estimated at approximately USD 500 million) from international institutional investors purchasing shares in the special-purpose vehicle.

The Agyapa deal was suspended in November 2020 by President Akufo-Addo after the Office of the Special Prosecutor (under Martin Amidu, the inaugural Special Prosecutor) issued a public letter on 13 October 2020 raising significant concerns about the procurement process, the valuation methodology, and the corruption risks associated with the structure. Amidu subsequently resigned from the Office of the Special Prosecutor on 16 November 2020, citing political interference; his resignation letter was published widely in Daily Graphic and Joy News coverage. The post-2020 follow-through on the Agyapa case — whether the suspended deal would be revived in modified form, whether the underlying valuation-and-procurement questions would be addressed, whether the Office of the Special Prosecutor would resume an active investigation — remained substantially unresolved through the 2021–2024 second term.

The Agyapa episode produced sustained civil-society contestation through 2020–2021 from CDD-Ghana, IMANI, Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition, and selected academic analysts. The cumulative effect was the consolidation of a "natural-resource-revenue-governance" critique of the Akufo-Addo administration that would resurface in the 2024 campaign cycle.

11.2 The 2022 Achimota Forest Declassification and "Sir John Will" Controversy

The Achimota Forest declassification controversy emerged in May 2022 with the publication of a Forestry Commission Executive Instrument purporting to reclassify portions of the Achimota Forest Reserve (a protected forest reserve on the northern edge of Accra, of approximately 400 hectares, originally gazetted in 1927 and continuously protected through the post-independence period). The Executive Instrument was signed by Minister of Lands and Natural Resources Samuel Abu Jinapor and dated 1 May 2022; the publication was discovered by civil-society actors in late May 2022 and produced immediate contestation.

The controversy was substantially compounded by the parallel publication of the "Sir John will" — the testamentary disposition of the late NPP-aligned Forestry Commission Chief Executive Officer Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie (popularly known as "Sir John", deceased July 2020) — which devised portions of state forest reserve land in the Achimota Forest area to family members and to selected business associates. The will's publication in May 2022 produced immediate questions about: the propriety of a state forestry official having disposed of state-owned forest reserve land in a personal testamentary instrument; the relationship between the will's devises and the Forestry Commission's May 2022 declassification instrument; and the broader political-economy of NPP-aligned land-administration practices.

The cumulative civil-society response — through CDD-Ghana, IMANI, Ghana Federation of Environmental NGOs, A Rocha Ghana, and the Ghana Bar Association — produced sustained pressure through mid-2022. The Akufo-Addo administration's response included the rescission of the Executive Instrument and the public commitment that no portions of the Achimota Forest Reserve would be alienated. The question of the will's enforceability and the broader political-economy of the episode remained contested through 2023–2024.

11.3 The 2023–2024 Galamsey Trajectory

The galamsey (illegal small-scale gold mining) policy trajectory was a defining contested-record element of both the first and second Akufo-Addo terms. The first-term Operation Vanguard (deployed July 2017) and the subsequent moratorium on small-scale-mining licensing (March 2017 – December 2018) had achieved a measure of enforcement during 2017–2019 but had not produced durable resolution. The post-2019 re-licensing produced renewed environmental and political controversies through 2020–2022, with documented contamination of selected rivers (the Pra, the Ankobra, the Birim, the Offin, and selected tributaries) and the cumulative degradation of selected cocoa-farming and forest-reserve areas. (Full forensic treatment in GH-E-03.)

The 2023–2024 trajectory culminated in the September 2024 mobilisation. On 21 September 2024, the Ghana Trades Union Congress (TUC) issued a public call for nationwide industrial action against the continued galamsey activity and against what the TUC characterised as the political-economy capture of the enforcement architecture by NPP-aligned mining interests. The Coalition Against Illegal Mining — a civil-society coalition encompassing approximately fifteen environmental, religious, and labour organisations — organised a sustained march in Accra on 21–22 September 2024 that was the largest single galamsey-focused civil-society mobilisation of the post-2017 period. The cumulative September 2024 mobilisation became one of the central rhetorical-organising moments of the 2024 election campaign against the Bawumia candidacy.

The political-economy of galamsey enforcement — the alleged protection of small-scale-mining operators by NPP-aligned political networks — became one of the most consequential 2024 campaign issues. The post-2024 Mahama administration's establishment of the GoldBod architecture in February 2025 (GH-E-03) and the parallel post-2024 galamsey-prosecution sequence are the post-handover continuations of the trajectory documented in this section.

11.4 The 2023–2024 LGBT+ Bill

The 2023–2024 LGBT+ Bill — formally the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, 2021 — was a private-member's bill introduced to Parliament in August 2021 by a coalition of eight MPs led by Sam George (NDC, Ningo-Prampram) and including selected NPP and NDC backbenchers. The Bill criminalised same-sex relationships, the advocacy of same-sex relationships, and the provision of selected services to LGBT-identifying persons, with penalties of up to three years' imprisonment (for individuals) and up to ten years' imprisonment (for advocacy and organisational offences).

The Bill's parliamentary trajectory was sustained across 2021–2024. The first reading occurred in August 2021; the committee-stage consideration extended across 2022–2023; the second-reading debate occurred in late 2023. The Bill was passed by Parliament on 28 February 2024 in a vote that was reported as broadly supportive across both NPP and NDC benches with limited dissent.

The Bill was not signed into law by President Akufo-Addo before the end of his term on 7 January 2025. The publicly-stated reasoning was that pending Supreme Court litigation — including the Amaliba v Speaker of Parliament challenge to the constitutional propriety of selected procedural aspects of the Bill's passage, and the parallel Dr Amanda Odoi v Speaker of Parliament & Ors challenge — should be allowed to conclude before presidential action. The question of whether Akufo-Addo had intended to sign the Bill before the end of his term, or whether the pending-litigation reasoning was a face-saving deferral, remained contested in the post-2024 commentary. The Bill's status at the 7 January 2025 handover was that it had been passed by Parliament but had not received presidential assent and was therefore not law; the post-2024 Mahama administration's posture on the Bill's reintroduction has been substantially circumspect.

The international political-economic incidence of the Bill was substantial. The World Bank suspended new lending operations to Ghana in March 2024 pending clarification of the Bill's status (with the suspension subsequently lifted on the basis of the absence of presidential assent); the European Union, the United Kingdom, and selected bilateral partners issued public statements of concern; the IMF programme reviews through 2024 incorporated the Bill's status as a contextual factor in the structural-governance dimension. The cumulative international-development-finance effect through 2024 was estimated at approximately USD 600 million in delayed or contingent disbursements [TBD-VERIFY: the precise quantification of the development-finance impact of the LGBT+ Bill controversy through 2024 is variously estimated across IMANI, CDD-Ghana, and academic analyses; the USD 600 million figure is the IMANI estimate of cumulative delayed disbursements].

---

12. The 2024 NPP Primary and the 7 December 2024 Election

12.1 The 4 November 2023 NPP Super-Delegate Conference

The NPP candidate-selection process for the 2024 election proceeded through a two-stage architecture introduced for the first time in the 2024 cycle: a Super-Delegate Conference (a constituency-and-regional-leadership preliminary vote) followed by the National Delegates Congress (the principal full-delegate vote). The Super-Delegate Conference, held on 4 November 2023 at Trinity Hall, Legon, narrowed the field of approximately ten declared aspirants to the final five candidates who would contest the National Delegates Congress.

The five candidates who emerged from the Super-Delegate Conference were: Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia; Trade Minister Alan Kyerematen; businessman-MP Kennedy Agyapong (Assin Central); Agriculture Minister Bryan Acheampong (Abetifi); and Education Minister Yaw Osei Adutwum (Bosomtwe). The vote at the Super-Delegate Conference reflected the institutional consolidation of NPP party-organisational support behind Bawumia, who emerged with the largest share of super-delegate votes.

12.2 The 4 November 2023 – 23 January 2024 Inter-Stage Period

The inter-stage period between the 4 November 2023 Super-Delegate Conference and the 23 January 2024 National Delegates Congress was characterised by sustained campaigning by the five candidates across the 17,000+ delegates eligible to vote at the Congress. The principal campaign-issue dimensions were: the macroeconomic-stabilisation-and-recovery narrative (on which Bawumia's Vice-Presidential record was both an asset and a liability); the broader NPP-internal-coalition question (on which Kyerematen's Asante-base appeal and Agyapong's anti-establishment messaging produced distinct alternatives); the question of which candidate could most plausibly defeat Mahama in the December 2024 general election.

The early-January 2024 internal polling — conducted by the NPP National Council's research apparatus and by selected independent pollsters — indicated a substantial Bawumia lead over Kyerematen as the principal challenger, with Agyapong as a strong third. The Bawumia campaign deployed substantial organisational resources across the constituency and regional party-structure networks; the Kyerematen campaign concentrated on the Asante region and on the Asante-diaspora-in-other-regions networks.

12.3 The 23 January 2024 National Delegates Congress

The 23 January 2024 NPP National Delegates Congress at the University of Ghana, Legon, produced Bawumia as the party's 2024 candidate. The certified vote count, as declared by the NPP Electoral Committee Chair Peter Mac Manu in the late-evening declaration:

• Mahamudu Bawumia: approximately 118,000 votes (61.4%)
• Kennedy Agyapong: approximately 40,800 votes (21.0%)
• Alan Kyerematen: approximately 27,800 votes (14.4%)
• Bryan Acheampong: approximately 4,500 votes (2.3%)
• Yaw Osei Adutwum: approximately 1,700 votes (0.9%)

[TBD-VERIFY: the precise round-by-round vote counts at the 23 January 2024 NPP National Delegates Congress are variously reported across Daily Graphic, Citi Newsroom, Joy News, and the NPP Electoral Committee declaration; the canonical source is the NPP Electoral Committee Final Declaration of 23 January 2024 published in the Daily Graphic of 24 January 2024.]

The first-round majority of 61.4% for Bawumia avoided the necessity of a run-off and produced an immediate consolidation of the NPP campaign architecture behind the Vice-President. The Bawumia victory reflected the cumulative party-organisational consolidation behind the sitting Vice-President; the Agyapong second-place finish reflected the anti-establishment-and-Asante-diaspora appeal of his campaign; the Kyerematen third-place finish was substantially below expectations and produced the subsequent post-Congress political-economic decision.

12.4 The Kyerematen Resignation and the Movement for Change

Alan Kyerematen resigned from the NPP in February 2024 — citing both disagreements with the party's institutional direction and procedural objections to the conduct of the 23 January 2024 Congress — and announced his candidacy for the December 2024 election as an independent under the banner of the Movement for Change. The Kyerematen independent campaign secured approximately 1.8% of the December 2024 presidential vote — substantially below early-2024 polling expectations but sufficient to register the Kyerematen faction as a discrete political-organisational presence.

The post-Kyerematen-resignation NPP internal dynamic — including the question of whether selected Asante-region NPP MPs and party officials would follow Kyerematen, and the parallel question of whether the Bawumia campaign could re-consolidate the Asante-region base after Kyerematen's departure — was one of the principal organisational-political questions of the February–November 2024 campaign period. The eventual December 2024 result indicated that the cumulative NPP Asante-region performance had substantially weakened, though the precise attribution of the weakening between the Kyerematen-resignation effect, the broader cost-of-living effect, and the Bawumia-candidate-specific effect remains contested.

12.5 The 2024 General Election Campaign

The 2024 general election campaign — spanning approximately ten months from the 23 January 2024 NPP Congress to the 7 December 2024 election — was structured around five principal issue dimensions. First, the cost-of-living question, on which the cumulative 130% consumer-price increase across 2021–2024 was the dominant rhetorical-organising fact and on which the NDC campaign concentrated its principal critique of the NPP record. Second, the macroeconomic-stabilisation-and-recovery question, on which the Bawumia campaign emphasised the post-2022 indicator recovery (disinflation from 54.1% to 23.2%; primary-balance recovery; cedi stabilisation; reserves recovery; Eurobond-exchange completion). Third, the galamsey question, on which the September 2024 mobilisation provided the principal campaign-mobilisation moment. Fourth, the corruption-and-accountability question, on which the Agyapa, Achimota, and broader-governance episodes provided rhetorical material. Fifth, the personal-and-character question, on which the NDC's Mahama-as-experience framing contrasted with the NPP's Bawumia-as-technocrat framing.

The campaign's polling trajectory through 2024 — as tracked by CDD-Ghana, the Multimedia Group Polls, and selected academic pollsters — indicated a sustained NDC lead through the period. The April–May 2024 polling indicated approximately Mahama 51% / Bawumia 39% on the principal head-to-head measure; the August–September 2024 polling indicated approximately Mahama 53% / Bawumia 38%; the October–November 2024 polling indicated approximately Mahama 55% / Bawumia 39%. The polling-margin tracking through the period was consistent with the eventual 7 December 2024 result.

12.6 The 17 October 2024 Kumasi Declaration

The 17 October 2024 Kumasi Declaration — a peace-pact ceremony convened by the National Peace Council at the Kumasi Cultural Centre and presided by Reverend Dr Ernest Adu-Gyamfi (National Peace Council Chair) — produced commitments by the principal presidential candidates (Mahama, Bawumia, Kyerematen, and the smaller-party candidates) to peaceful electoral conduct, to acceptance of the certified results, and to constitutional transition. The Declaration was modelled on the prior peace-pact ceremonies of the 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 election cycles and reflected the institutional consolidation of pre-election peace-pact architecture as a Fourth-Republic political-cultural norm.

The Kumasi Declaration's framing of the 2024 cycle was substantially calmer than the parallel international-observer commentary had anticipated, reflecting the cumulative Ghanaian post-1992 electoral-political-cultural maturity. The cumulative effect through November–December 2024 was the establishment of the political-cultural-procedural foundation that produced the orderly 7 December 2024 election and the subsequent transition.

12.7 The 7 December 2024 Election Result

The 7 December 2024 election produced the most decisive single-cycle repudiation of an incumbent governing party in Fourth-Republic Ghanaian history. The Electoral Commission's certified presidential result:

• John Dramani Mahama (NDC): 6,591,790 votes (56.55%)
• Mahamudu Bawumia (NPP): 4,846,544 votes (41.61%)
• Alan Kyerematen (Movement for Change): 209,000 votes (1.79%)
• Other candidates and independents: combined approximately 70,000 votes (0.6%)

[TBD-VERIFY: the precise Electoral Commission certified vote totals and percentage shares from the 7 December 2024 election are recorded in the EC's Final Declaration of Presidential Results of 9 December 2024; the certified margin between Mahama and Bawumia is variously cited as 14.94 percentage points or 14.94 with secondary rounding effects, with the EC's canonical number being the definitive source.]

The presidential margin of approximately 14.94 percentage points was the largest single-cycle margin against an incumbent governing party in Fourth-Republic history. The parliamentary result was equally consequential: the NDC won 183 seats of the 276-seat parliament — a parliamentary supermajority of approximately 66.3% of seats — against the NPP's 88 seats (a contraction from the 137 seats of the 2020 result). The cumulative scale of the NPP electoral collapse — both presidential and parliamentary — was the most decisive single-cycle electoral repudiation in Fourth-Republic Ghanaian history.

12.8 The 8 December 2024 Bawumia Concession

Vice-President Bawumia conceded the election on 8 December 2024, before the formal Electoral Commission declaration of all results. The concession address — delivered at the NPP National Headquarters in Accra in the presence of senior NPP party officials — congratulated Mahama on his victory, committed the NPP to constitutional transition, and committed Bawumia personally to continued service to the party and to the country. The concession was widely characterised across CDD-Ghana, IDEG, and international-observer commentary as a consolidation of Ghana's electoral-democratic-cultural norm of incumbent-party concession.

The Akufo-Addo response to the concession was issued through a Presidency press statement on 9 December 2024, acknowledging the result and committing the administration to the orderly transition. The 9 December 2024 – 7 January 2025 transition period was substantially uneventful, with the Transition Committee work proceeding under the established Fourth-Republic procedural framework.

12.9 The 7 January 2025 Handover

The 7 January 2025 inauguration of John Dramani Mahama at Black Star Square transferred power on the constitutionally prescribed date with no procedural irregularities — the eighth consecutive peaceful transition since the Fourth Republic's founding in 1992. The inauguration was attended by ECOWAS heads of state and produced the Mahama inaugural address committing the new administration to economic reset, to the continuation of the IMF programme, and to selected post-2024 policy reforms. (Full forensic treatment of the transition and the post-2024 trajectory in GH-E-01, GH-E-02, and GH-E-04.)

The 7 January 2025 inauguration was the conclusion of the Akufo-Addo second term as a discrete political-economic-historical unit. The four years between the 7 January 2021 inauguration and the 7 January 2025 handover had encompassed the deepest sovereign-debt crisis of the Fourth-Republic period, the most extensive sovereign-debt restructuring in sub-Saharan African history, the largest single-year cedi depreciation since 1983, the highest annual inflation since 1995, and the most decisive single-cycle electoral repudiation of an incumbent governing party. The cumulative second-term record will be the subject of continuing post-2025 commentary across academic, civil-society, and partisan registers.

---

13. The Three-Account Reading of the Second Term

13.1 The Technical / Ministry-of-Finance / IMF Account

The first principal account of the 2021–2024 second term — articulated through Ministry of Finance press releases through 2022–2024, through the IMF Staff Reports of May 2023 and the subsequent Reviews, and through selected Bank of Ghana publications — emphasises three interpretive moves. First, the 2022 crisis was the product of exogenous shocks: the COVID-19 fiscal expansion of FY 2020 (which produced the 11.7%-of-GDP deficit that became the baseline for the post-2020 trajectory); the post-March 2022 US Federal Reserve tightening cycle (which closed Eurobond market access across the sub-Saharan African sovereign cluster); the February 2022 Russia–Ukraine commodity-price shock (which transmitted into headline inflation through the petroleum-and-food channels). Second, the December 2022 debt-restructuring sequence was the minimum restructuring necessary under the IMF debt-sustainability framework: the DDEP terms were calibrated to produce the debt-stock reduction sufficient to bring the present-value-of-debt-to-GDP ratio to a "moderate risk" threshold by 2028; the external-debt restructuring under the G20 Common Framework was the standard architecture for the post-2020 sovereign-restructuring cluster. Third, the 2023–2024 macroeconomic adjustment had stabilised the fundamentals at the handover point: the disinflation from 54.1% to 23.2%; the primary-balance recovery from −4.3% to +0.3% of GDP; the cedi stabilisation; the reserves recovery; the Eurobond exchange completion.

The technical account's implicit normative posture is that the Akufo-Addo administration's macroeconomic management through the crisis period was competent within the constraints imposed by the exogenous shocks, that the debt-restructuring architecture was appropriately calibrated, and that the post-2024 inheritance was a substantially stabilised macroeconomic environment whose subsequent management would determine the durability of the recovery.

13.2 The CDD-Ghana / IDEG / Civil-Society Distributional-Incidence Account

The second principal account — articulated through CDD-Ghana, IDEG, IMANI, ACEP, and the Pensioners Association of Ghana / Ghana Individual Bondholders Forum coalition — emphasises three counterposed interpretive moves. First, the pre-2022 fiscal trajectory had been substantially driven by domestic policy choices that the IMF Article IV 2021 Consultation had flagged and that the administration had declined to adjust at the recommended speed and scale; the post-2022 framing of the crisis as principally exogenous understated the domestic-policy contribution to the underlying vulnerability. Second, the DDEP imposed distributional incidence disproportionately on individual savers, pensioners, and financial institutions — categories whose institutional voice was substantially weaker than that of multilateral creditors and that bore disproportionate present-value loss relative to their structural responsibility for the underlying fiscal trajectory; the post-2023 distributional consequences for affected pensioners (the cumulative pension-replacement-rate impact estimated at 5–8% reduction across the affected cohorts) and for the broader financial-sector institutional architecture (the cumulative recapitalisation cost of approximately ₵12 billion absorbed through the Ghana Financial Stability Fund) reflect the structural inequity. Third, the parallel governance-controversy record (Agyapa, Achimota, galamsey, LGBT+ Bill) reflected institutional weakness in transparency, accountability, and rule-of-law architecture that the macroeconomic-recovery narrative could not paper over.

The civil-society account's implicit normative posture is that the Akufo-Addo administration's macroeconomic management was responsible for the underlying vulnerability through 2017–2021, that the distributional choices embedded in the DDEP reflect a problematic institutional-political-economy, and that the cumulative second-term record represents a substantial governance-quality failure that the 2024 electoral repudiation appropriately reflected.

13.3 The NPP / NDC Partisan Account

The third principal account — articulated through the NPP and NDC partisan organisations and through the post-2024 commentary cycles — emphasises the partisan framing of the inheritance question. The NPP framing positions the post-2024 macroeconomic environment as substantially stabilised at the handover point: the disinflation trajectory; the primary-balance recovery; the cedi stabilisation; the Eurobond exchange completion. On this framing, the NPP's macroeconomic management during the crisis period was competent within the constraints imposed by exogenous shocks; the subsequent political-economic management of the recovery belongs to the inheriting NDC administration, and the durability or otherwise of the recovery should be attributed to post-2024 policy choices rather than to the pre-2024 NPP record.

The NDC framing positions the post-2024 macroeconomic environment as structurally damaged: the cumulative 130% consumer-price increase across 2021–2024 substantially unrecovered by nominal-wage adjustments; the public-debt-to-GDP ratio still elevated post-restructuring; the broader macroeconomic-and-institutional-credibility loss that the 2022 crisis had imposed. On this framing, the NPP's macroeconomic management during the second term was responsible for the underlying vulnerability and for the cumulative distributional incidence; the subsequent corrective work belongs to the inheriting NDC administration in the structural sense rather than the narrowly-managerial sense, and the durability of the recovery requires both the technical-macroeconomic stabilisation and the broader institutional-and-policy reset that the post-2024 administration is pursuing.

13.4 The Post-2024 Reading

The post-2024 reading of the second term, taken as a discrete political-economic-historical unit, situates it at the intersection of three broader trajectories. First, it sits within the post-1992 NPP–NDC alternation pattern (GH-O-02): the eighth Fourth-Republic election produced the third complete two-term alternation and confirmed the durability of the alternation rhythm. The Akufo-Addo second term's electoral repudiation was substantially larger than the prior 2008 (NPP-out, NDC-in, 0.46-percentage-point margin) and 2016 (NDC-out, NPP-in, 9.45-percentage-point margin) alternation cycles; the cumulative trend across the three alternation cycles indicates a substantial widening of the inter-cycle electoral-amplitude that may reflect both increasing voter-disenchantment with cumulative-incumbency and increasing structural-fragility of the Fourth-Republic electoral-political-economy.

Second, the second term sits within the post-COVID sub-Saharan African debt-restructuring cluster — Zambia 2020 default and 2024 Eurobond exchange; Chad 2022 Common Framework completion; Ethiopia 2023 default; Ghana 2022 default and 2024 completion — as the third G20 Common Framework case to reach completion and the second sub-Saharan African Eurobond exchange of the post-2020 period. 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.

Third, the second term sits within the post-2008 Ghanaian fiscal-policy cycle — the 2009 IMF programme under Mills (GH-D-01); the 2015 IMF programme under Mahama (GH-D-01, GH-H-PRES-05); the 2023 IMF programme under Akufo-Addo; the post-2025 IMF programme continuation under Mahama (GH-E-02, GH-E-04, GH-D-06) — that suggests a structural reliance on IMF discipline that the Fourth-Republic political-economic settlement has not yet resolved. The cumulative pattern of post-2008 IMF programmes under both NPP and NDC administrations indicates that the underlying fiscal-policy trajectory has been a cross-partisan structural feature rather than a strictly partisan-attributable outcome; the question of whether the post-2025 trajectory will produce a durable post-IMF Ghanaian fiscal-policy settlement remains the central long-run question.

---

14. Conclusion — The Second Term as Discrete Historical Unit

The Akufo-Addo second term (7 January 2021 – 7 January 2025) is a discrete political-economic-historical unit whose interpretation is structured by the four years of macroeconomic deterioration, sovereign-debt restructuring, partial recovery, and decisive electoral repudiation that constitute its content. The narrow 3.94-percentage-point re-election margin of 7 December 2020, the 137–137 hung parliament that conditioned the legislative environment, the 6–7 January 2021 Bagbin Speakership election, the November 2021 Budget and the e-Levy controversy, the 2022 cedi-and-inflation cascade, the 5 December 2022 DDEP launch, the 19 December 2022 external default, the 17 May 2023 IMF ECF approval, the 2023–2024 macroeconomic adjustment, the parallel galamsey / Achimota / LGBT+ Bill controversies, the 23 January 2024 NPP primary that selected Bawumia, the 3 October 2024 – 6 November 2024 Eurobond Exchange completion, the 7 December 2024 electoral repudiation, and the 7 January 2025 handover together constitute a closed political-economic cycle whose long-run interpretation will be the subject of continuing commentary.

The cumulative numerical record of the second term: a 58% cedi depreciation across eleven months in 2022; a peak headline inflation of 54.1% in December 2022; a peak Policy Rate of 30.0% held March 2023 – August 2024; an approximately 130% cumulative consumer-price increase across 2021–2024; a DDEP covering approximately ₵137 billion of cedi-denominated bonds at approximately 85% participation; an external-debt restructuring covering approximately USD 18.5 billion (USD 5.4 billion bilateral plus USD 13.1 billion commercial) under the G20 Common Framework; an IMF ECF disbursement of approximately USD 2.4 billion cumulative through April 2025; a primary-balance trajectory from −4.3% (FY 2022) to +0.3% (FY 2024); an Electoral Commission certified result of 56.55% to 41.61% (a 14.94-percentage-point margin) in the 7 December 2024 election and a parliamentary collapse from 137 to 88 seats. These numbers are the load-bearing record of the second term and the structural-empirical basis on which the contested-record questions will be adjudicated across the post-2025 academic, civil-society, and partisan registers.

The three-account framing of the second term — the technical / IMF account; the civil-society distributional-incidence account; the partisan NPP / NDC accounts — preserves the analytic-historiographical-honesty required of the corpus while documenting the contestation of the period. The post-2025 reading of the second term will substantially turn on the durability of the post-2024 macroeconomic recovery: if the post-2025 Mahama administration is able to consolidate the post-DDEP-and-Eurobond-exchange fiscal architecture into a durable post-IMF Ghanaian fiscal-policy settlement, the second term will be read as a painful but ultimately recovered crisis; if the post-2025 trajectory requires further restructuring or produces renewed macroeconomic deterioration, the second term will be read as the first cycle of a deeper structural-fiscal vulnerability that the Fourth-Republic political-economic settlement has not yet resolved.

The cumulative effect on the Fourth-Republic political-economic settlement is in either case substantial. The Akufo-Addo second term will be studied as the period in which the post-1992 Ghanaian fiscal-policy trajectory reached the limits of its post-HIPC re-leveraging architecture; as the period in which the first sovereign default of a Fourth-Republic government produced both the largest sovereign-debt restructuring in sub-Saharan African history and the most decisive single-cycle electoral repudiation; and as the period in which the post-2008 Ghanaian alternation rhythm produced its third complete cycle and confirmed the durability of the institutional-democratic settlement against the substantial economic-and-political stress that the 2022 crisis had imposed.

The man at the centre of this period — President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo — concluded his presidency with the conventional Fourth-Republic procedural-democratic dignity that has characterised every Ghanaian post-1992 outgoing president and with the cumulative-presidential record that GH-D-03 documents in its eight-year sweep and that GH-H-PRES-06 records in his whole-life biographical frame. The post-presidential trajectory through mid-2026 has been comparatively quiet, with selected Office of the Special Prosecutor investigations into Akufo-Addo-administration officials continuing through 2025–2026 as a continuing political-rhetorical undercurrent. The full long-run reading of the Akufo-Addo presidency — both terms taken together — will require the post-2025 decade to mature before definitive interpretive verdicts become available; this document records the second-term political-economic content as faithfully as the available 2021–2026 sources permit.

---

End of Document GH-D-07