GH-E-02: John Mahama's Second Presidency — The 24-Hour Economy, the Reset Cabinet, and the First Hundred Days of Recovery (January–April 2025)

1. Key Takeaways

• John Dramani Mahama's second presidency was inaugurated on 7 January 2025 at Independence Square, Accra, exactly eight years after he had handed power to Nana Akufo-Addo on the same date in 2017. He is the first president in the history of the Fourth Republic — and the second leader in sub-Saharan Africa's post-1990 multiparty era — to return to the presidency through a non-consecutive electoral comeback. His mandate is the largest received by any Fourth-Republic incumbent or challenger since 1996: 56.55% of the presidential vote and a National Democratic Congress (NDC) parliamentary supermajority of 184 seats (plus four NDC-aligned independents) against 88 New Patriotic Party (NPP) seats in the 276-seat Ninth Parliament. Speaker Alban Bagbin was re-elected to the chair. The combined effect was an executive-legislative alignment Ghana had not previously experienced in the Fourth Republic and which structurally enabled a legislative-and-administrative "Reset" agenda that defined the first hundred days.

• The Reset Cabinet was deliberately compressed by Mahama's stated commitment to a "lean government" of no more than sixty ministers and deputy ministers — approximately half the size of the outgoing Akufo-Addo cabinet of 123 ministers and deputies. The first tranche of nineteen ministerial nominations was gazetted on 9 January 2025; substantive cabinet announcements followed on 22 January 2025, with Hon. Dr Cassiel Ato Forson at Finance, Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa at Foreign Affairs, Hon. Dr Dominic Ayine as Attorney-General and Minister of Justice [TBD-VERIFY: some pre-inauguration speculation pointed to Hon. Mahama Ayariga for Justice; the final nomination went to Hon. Ayine — verify against the gazetted appointments and the January 2025 vetting record], Hon. Edward Omane Boamah at Defence, Hon. John Abdulai Jinapor at Energy and Green Transition, Hon. Eric Opoku at Food and Agriculture, Hon. Haruna Iddrisu at Education, Hon. Dr Kwabena Mintah Akandoh at Health, and Hon. Joseph Bukari Nikpe at Transport. The vetting process before the Appointments Committee of Parliament, chaired by First Deputy Speaker Bernard Ahiafor, was conducted in late January and early February 2025 and produced no nomination rejections — a function of the parliamentary supermajority — though three nominees faced sustained interrogation on conflicts-of-interest declarations and post-2017 contract-history disclosures.

• The 7 January 2025 inaugural address articulated a "Five Pillars of the Reset" frame: (i) the 24-Hour Economy as a labour-and-investment policy framework intended to lift the structural unemployment rate; (ii) Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL) as the recovery-and-accountability instrument for assets and contracts allegedly misappropriated under the Akufo-Addo administration; (iii) the abolition of the so-called "nuisance taxes" — the e-Levy, the betting tax, the emissions tax, and the partial reduction of the COVID-19 Health Recovery Levy — in implementation of the 2024 NDC manifesto; (iv) a Constitutional Review and a proposed 2026 mid-term constitutional referendum to address Article 71-holder remuneration and the Chapter 8 decentralisation provisions; and (v) a comprehensive galamsey-eradication programme. The five pillars were affirmed in the 27 February 2025 State of the Nation Address (SONA) before Parliament and in the 16 April 2025 "First Hundred Days" address to the nation. The compactness of the doctrinal frame — five publicly verifiable pillars rather than a hundred bullet points — was widely received as a deliberate communications-discipline departure from the dense thematic frameworks of the predecessor administrations.

• The 11 March 2025 Budget Statement, delivered by Hon. Dr Cassiel Ato Forson under the slogan "Resetting the Economy for the Ghana We Want", was the first Mahama-era budget and the implementing instrument for the manifesto's fiscal-policy commitments. The Budget legislated the repeal of the e-Levy (the 1.5% electronic-transfer tax introduced under Akufo-Addo's 2022 Budget), the betting tax (a 10% withholding on gross gaming winnings), the emissions tax (a vehicle-emissions levy), and a partial reduction of the COVID-19 Health Recovery Levy. The cumulative revenue forgone was estimated at approximately ₵6.1 billion (around 0.7% of GDP) [TBD-VERIFY: the precise revenue-foregone estimate varies between the Ministry of Finance's mid-March figure and the IMF Fourth Review staff estimate; the ₵6.1 billion figure is the Budget Statement's headline number subject to revision in the mid-year review]. To offset the revenue loss, the Budget retained the IMF programme's primary-surplus target of +1.5% of GDP for 2025, introduced a Growth and Sustainability Levy on selected high-margin sectors, restored the road tolls (under a digital architecture distinct from the pre-2021 system), and committed to enhanced revenue-administration measures through the Ghana Revenue Authority.

• The IMF Fourth Review of the Extended Credit Facility, concluded in April 2025 in Country Report No. 25/45 (or successor), was the principal external-confidence test of the first hundred days. Staff assessed the programme as broadly on track despite the tax-handle changes; all quantitative performance criteria for end-December 2024 were met or modified by mutual agreement; the structural benchmarks for end-March 2025 were substantially met; and a tranche of approximately USD 360 million was released. The Mahama administration's negotiation, conducted by Finance Minister Forson and BoG Governor Dr Ernest Addison (whose term-of-office continued past the change of government), produced an IMF-acceptable design for the abolition of the nuisance taxes by demonstrating compensating revenue-administration measures and expenditure restraint. The Fourth Review verdict was politically consequential: it confirmed that the NDC's manifesto promises could be delivered within the IMF programme framework rather than requiring a programme renegotiation, which had been one of the principal NPP-opposition critiques of the manifesto.

• The 24-Hour Economy policy framework — the centrepiece of the manifesto and the most distinctive doctrinal contribution of the second Mahama presidency — was institutionalised through the establishment in January 2025 of a 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development Secretariat under the leadership of Hon. Augustus "Goosie" Tanoh, a senior NDC strategist who had served on the 2024 campaign technical team. The doctrine, elaborated in a series of policy briefings between January and April 2025, proposed sectoral 24-hour operations across (i) manufacturing and agro-processing (with targeted incentives for triple-shift operations); (ii) information and communications technology and business-process outsourcing (ICT/BPO); (iii) financial services (extended banking hours and 24-hour digital infrastructure); and (iv) logistics-and-port operations (notably Tema and Takoradi ports). The doctrine drew empirical grounding from the Ghana Statistical Service's 2022 Annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey (AHIES) reading of structural underemployment and from comparative readings of the Mauritian, Vietnamese, and Mexican industrial-policy experiences [TBD-VERIFY: the comparative empirical foundations cited in the 24-Hour Economy policy papers; the early-2025 documents do not always make explicit the comparative-case grounding, which has appeared more clearly in Hon. Tanoh's subsequent public briefings].

• The 24-Hour Economy framework was accompanied by two flagship institutional innovations announced in the first hundred days: the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod), a state institution established by executive instrument in February 2025 and given statutory architecture in the March 2025 Budget cycle to consolidate state-led gold purchases from small-scale miners, replace the role of the Precious Minerals Marketing Company in part of the value chain, and operate as a foreign-exchange anchor through state-managed gold-export receipts; and the announced Goldcoast Bank concept, a proposed financial institution that would operate as a 24-hour-economy financier and gold-backed-deposit institution, the institutional architecture of which was at the conceptual stage through April 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: the Goldcoast Bank had not been operationally established by the end of the first hundred days; the policy concept was elaborated in 24-Hour Economy Secretariat briefings and in the Hon. Forson Budget Statement but the legislative and capitalisation steps remained pending]. GoldBod's initial operations contributed to the documented Q1 2025 cedi appreciation by smoothing the foreign-exchange supply from gold receipts; the Bank of Ghana's reserves position improved correspondingly through January–April 2025.

• Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL), established by Mahama on 23 December 2024 during the transition period and chaired by businessman-philanthropist Daniel Ofori (a high-profile NDC-aligned investor with substantial holdings on the Ghana Stock Exchange), was the recovery-and-accountability instrument that became the most politically polarising element of the first hundred days. The ORAL Committee was structured as a presidential committee with a mandate to (i) receive public submissions on alleged Akufo-Addo-era misappropriations of state assets; (ii) prepare case dossiers for transmission to the Office of the Attorney-General, the Office of the Special Prosecutor, the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO), and the Criminal Investigations Department of the Ghana Police Service; and (iii) report publicly on aggregate-level findings. The 10 February 2025 Preliminary Report disclosed approximately 2,417 public submissions received in the first month and identified eleven priority cases for immediate transmission, including the Saglemi affordable-housing project, the National Ambulance Service procurement, the National Cathedral expenditure, the Agyapa Royalties transaction, the Sky Train concession, the National Lotteries Authority (NLA) digital-platform contract, and the Pwalugu Multipurpose Dam contract. The cumulative recovery-claim figure publicly cited in February 2025 was approximately USD 21 billion in alleged misappropriated assets [TBD-VERIFY: the headline figure is contested; the Akufo-Addo-era NPP rebuttal characterised the figure as a political-rhetorical maximum rather than a forensic-accounting estimate; the Mahama administration distinguished between "alleged" and "recoverable" figures in the Hundred-Day Address].

• Galamsey policy in the first hundred days proceeded along three lines. First, Operation Halt II — the militarised galamsey-suppression task force established under the Akufo-Addo administration — was reactivated and intensified in late January 2025 with reinforced Ghana Armed Forces and Ghana Police Service deployments to the principal galamsey-affected forest reserves (Atewa, Apamprama, Tano-Anwia, Subri, and the Pra-Birim-Ankobra-Densu river-basin areas). The first quarter of 2025 saw arrests, equipment seizures (notably excavators and changfan platforms), and the destruction of identified illegal mining sites. Second, the Forestry Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency commenced a parallel rehabilitation programme for the most heavily degraded river basins, drawing on the December 2024 Ghana Water Company technical baseline. Third, the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources under Hon. Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah [TBD-VERIFY: the actual portfolio assignment for Hon. Buah; the manifesto had referenced Hon. Kweku Buah for Local Government and Hon. Mohammed Adam Sukparu for Lands — verify the final gazetted assignments] commenced the drafting of a National Galamsey Eradication Authority Bill intended to consolidate the regulatory authority that had been distributed across the Minerals Commission, the Forestry Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the security agencies. The Bill was tabled in Parliament in March 2025 and entered committee consideration. The civil-society coalition that had driven the September 2024 strike wave (the Coalition Against Illegal Mining, the Ghana Trades Union Congress, the Ghana Medical Association) received the early-2025 enforcement actions with cautious endorsement while pressing for the unconditional repeal of the L.I. 2462 (the 2022 Akufo-Addo-era amendment to the Minerals and Mining Regulations that had permitted small-scale mining in forest reserves under presidential warrant) — a step the Mahama administration committed to in principle but had not legislated by the end of the first hundred days.

• The Bank of Ghana's monetary-policy stance through the first hundred days was characterised by continuity-of-personnel under Governor Dr Ernest Addison, whose statutory four-year term continued past the change of government, and by a cautious easing trajectory. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) held its January 2025 meeting with the Policy Rate at 27.0% (unchanged from the November 2024 setting), then cut by 100 basis points to 26.0% at the March 2025 meeting in light of the cedi appreciation, the slowing inflation trajectory, and the IMF Fourth Review assessment. Headline consumer-price inflation declined from 23.8% (November 2024) to 23.2% (January 2025) to approximately 22.4% (April 2025) — a continuation of the gradual disinflation begun under the previous administration's IMF programme. The cedi appreciated from approximately ¢14.7/USD (early December 2024) to ¢15.2/USD (early January 2025; election-period interbank volatility) to ¢14.8/USD (early February 2025) to approximately ¢13.9/USD by mid-April 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: the precise interbank reference rates across the period; the Bank of Ghana's daily reference rate and the parallel bureau-de-change rate diverged at points in January 2025; the headline trajectory of a modest appreciation through Q1 2025 is robust across sources, but precise daily rates should be sourced from the BoG Daily Interbank Rate series]. Treasury-bill yields on the 91-day instrument declined from approximately 28.5% (December 2024) to approximately 24.7% (April 2025), restoring some depth to the post-DDEP primary market.

• ECOWAS and West African foreign-policy dynamics were shaped during the first hundred days by the 29 January 2025 effective withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger from the Economic Community of West African States — the formal completion of the Alliance of Sahel States (Alliance des États du Sahel, AES) departure announced one year previously. Mahama, who had been appointed ECOWAS Special Envoy/Mediator to the Sahel States in June 2024 by the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State, retained the role through the transition into his presidency and conducted continuing diplomatic engagement with the AES governments through January–April 2025. The Mahama-era ECOWAS posture, as articulated in his SONA and in successive ECOWAS Authority statements, has been characterised by emphasis on (i) maintaining trade-and-movement linkages with the AES economies despite the formal political withdrawal; (ii) re-engagement on the regional-security agenda with attention to the trans-Sahel terrorism trajectory; and (iii) preserving the long-running ECOWAS-Eco-currency project despite the AES departure. The CFA-franc/Eco currency debate has been revisited in early-2025 ECOWAS communiqués but no operational decisions were taken in the first hundred days.

• The three-account reading of the first hundred days clusters around durable interpretive positions that will continue through subsequent commentary. The Mahama / NDC Reset / institutional-cleanup account characterises the period as the executive-legislative implementation of a clear electoral mandate to abolish nuisance taxes, recover misappropriated assets, deliver the 24-Hour Economy framework, and reset the institutional architecture damaged by the 2022–24 debt crisis. The NPP-opposition account, articulated by Minority Leader Hon. Alexander Afenyo-Markin and by Bawumia's post-defeat commentary, characterises ORAL as vindictive prosecution outside due-process bounds, the 24-Hour Economy as a rhetorical project without operational substance, the nuisance-tax repeal as fiscally-irresponsible populism that will require offsetting tax increases later, and the cabinet's "lean" framing as obscuring an expanded informal-advisory-presidential-staff payroll. The structural reading, articulated by CDD-Ghana, IMANI, ACEP, and academic commentary (Joseph Kraus, H. Kwasi Prempeh, Bright Simons), characterises the post-2022 Ghanaian state as a debt-restructured rentier-democracy whose macroeconomic stabilisation requires continuing fiscal discipline regardless of the partisan rotation, and which inherits structural constraints — bilateral-debt servicing under the G20 Common Framework, Eurobond-coupon servicing under the November 2024 exchange, IMF programme conditionality through 2026 — that no government could reverse in a hundred days. The three accounts are mutually exclusive on the politics but mutually reconcilable on the macro-fundamentals, and the second-hundred-days and first-anniversary assessments will operate within this analytical triangle.

---

2. The Transition (8 December 2024 – 6 January 2025)

2.1 The Concession, the Joint Transition Team, and Julius Debrah's Designation

The constitutional transition was triggered by the Electoral Commission's 9 December 2024 declaration of John Dramani Mahama as President-Elect under Article 63 of the 1992 Constitution and by Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia's televised concession on the morning of 8 December 2024 (see GH-E-01 §3). The interval between concession and inauguration — exactly thirty days under the constitutional calendar — was conducted under the Presidential Transition Act, 2012 (Act 845), Ghana's principal statute governing presidential handover, enacted under Mahama's own first-term administration and amended in 2020 to provide for joint transition teams convened by both the outgoing and incoming presidents.

President Akufo-Addo and President-Elect Mahama signed the inception note of the Joint Transition Team on 13 December 2024 at Jubilee House, in a ceremony broadcast by Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and attended by the Chief of Staff to the President (Hon. Frema Osei-Opare, outgoing) and by Mahama's nominated transition team head Hon. Julius Debrah, who had served as Chief of Staff under Mahama's first-term administration (2014–2017) and whose designation signalled both institutional continuity within the NDC and a strong organisational hand on the handover process. The Joint Transition Team comprised twenty members — ten nominated by each side — and convened in five sub-committees (economy and finance; energy and natural resources; foreign affairs and security; social services; constitutional and legal affairs) that mirrored the principal portfolios of the incoming administration.

Hon. Stan Dogbe, who had served as Special Aide and Director of Communications under Mahama's first-term administration and as Director-of-Operations on the 2024 NDC campaign, was assigned an operational coordinating role within the transition. The pre-inauguration period also saw the designation of Hon. Mark Ofori as Mahama's incoming Director of Communications at the Office of the President. The Hon. Felix Kwakye Ofosu, NDC parliamentarian and a senior 2024 campaign strategist, was designated as the incoming Minister for Government Communications.

The transition's material output included (i) classified handover dossiers on the IMF programme, the Eurobond restructuring (which had closed on 6 November 2024), the bilateral debt-restructuring implementation, and the energy-sector receivables; (ii) the inventory of pending legislation in the dissolving Eighth Parliament; (iii) a security-sector briefing on the galamsey enforcement architecture and the post-AES regional security trajectory; and (iv) the catalogue of state assets and contracts considered by the incoming administration as candidates for ORAL examination. The Joint Transition Team's final report was delivered to both presidents on 4 January 2025, three days before the inauguration.

2.2 The Establishment of ORAL: 23 December 2024

The Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL) initiative was announced by President-Elect Mahama on 23 December 2024 from his Cantonments residence at a press briefing attended by Ghanaian and international media. The announcement preceded the inauguration by fifteen days, making it the most consequential pre-inauguration policy intervention of any Fourth-Republic president-elect. The unusual timing was a deliberate choice: by establishing ORAL during the transition period rather than after the inauguration, the incoming administration signalled (i) that the recovery agenda would be central to the second-term mandate; (ii) that the public-submissions mechanism would be opened immediately rather than at a later stage; and (iii) that the outgoing administration would be expected to cooperate with the recovery exercise rather than treat it as a post-handover political instrument.

The 23 December 2024 establishment notice identified businessman-philanthropist Daniel Ofori as the ORAL Committee chair. Ofori, a high-profile investor whose holdings on the Ghana Stock Exchange include marked positions in Enterprise Group, GCB Bank, and other financial-sector listings, had been a public critic of the Akufo-Addo administration's handling of selected procurement and policy episodes and had supported the 2024 NDC campaign. The Committee's other publicly identified members included representatives drawn from the legal profession (notably Hon. Martin Kpebu, a constitutional-law practitioner), civil society (a CDD-Ghana-aligned anti-corruption specialist), and forensic-accounting practice. The Committee was structured to operate from offices at the Office of the President with technical support from the Bureau of National Investigations, the Economic and Organised Crime Office, and the Office of the Special Prosecutor.

The ORAL public-submissions mechanism — a dedicated email address, a physical mailbox at Jubilee House, and a confidential telephone line — was opened on 27 December 2024 and received an estimated 1,800 submissions in the first three weeks. The submissions ranged from documented procurement allegations (with supporting contracts and bank records attached) to anonymous tips on specific officials and contracts. The Committee's preliminary triage workflow, articulated in the 10 February 2025 Preliminary Report, distinguished between (i) submissions with prima facie evidentiary support sufficient to merit transmission to the Attorney-General or the Special Prosecutor; (ii) submissions warranting further investigation by the Committee's technical staff; and (iii) submissions with insufficient evidentiary content to warrant action.

The NPP's immediate response to the ORAL announcement, articulated by Hon. Yaw Buaben Asamoa as NPP Communications Director and subsequently by the incoming Minority Leader Hon. Alexander Afenyo-Markin, characterised ORAL as a political-prosecution instrument designed to harass outgoing officials rather than as a forensic-recovery mechanism. The position was reiterated in a 30 December 2024 NPP press statement that committed the party to legal challenges of specific ORAL-derived prosecutions. The Akufo-Addo administration, through Hon. Godfred Yeboah Dame as outgoing Attorney-General, declined formal cooperation with ORAL during the transition period; the significant cooperation framework would not be operationalised until after the 22 January 2025 cabinet appointments.

2.3 The 24-Hour Economy Pre-Inauguration Architecture

The 24-Hour Economy policy framework, the central doctrinal innovation of the NDC 2024 manifesto, was pre-positioned during the transition for January 2025 institutional launch. Hon. Augustus "Goosie" Tanoh, a senior NDC strategist and former presidential candidate in NDC primary contests, who had served as the 2024 campaign's principal economic-policy author, was confirmed during the transition as the designated head of the proposed 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development Secretariat. Tanoh had spent the second half of 2024 developing the operational framework through a series of stakeholder consultations with the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), the Ghana Employers Association, the Trades Union Congress, the Ghana Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre.

The pre-inauguration architecture comprised (i) a draft Executive Instrument establishing the Secretariat as a presidential agency reporting through the Office of the President; (ii) a sectoral mapping identifying twelve priority sub-sectors for 24-hour-operations incentives, including textile-and-garment manufacturing, agro-processing (cocoa, cashew, shea, palm oil, fruits and vegetables), aluminium and steel, ICT/BPO, financial services, and port-and-logistics operations; (iii) a fiscal-incentives framework drawing on the existing Free Zones Authority architecture and on selected provisions of the Income Tax Act 2015 (Act 896); and (iv) a financing-architecture concept under which a proposed Goldcoast Bank would operate as the principal financier of 24-hour-operations capital expenditure and working capital, with capitalisation drawn from state participation and from private-sector strategic partners.

The pre-inauguration consultations included specific engagements with Sentuo Group (the Chinese-owned operator of Ghana's Sentuo Steel facility at Tema, opened in 2023 under the post-2017 Industrial Policy of the Akufo-Addo administration) on the prospects for a triple-shift expansion of the Tema steel operations; with the Volta Aluminium Company (VALCO) on the long-pending question of the smelter restart; and with the Association of Ghana Industries on aggregate-level willingness-to-invest in 24-hour operations conditional on policy clarity. The output of these consultations — captured in a 4 January 2025 confidential briefing to the President-Elect — informed the priority-sectoral sequencing announced after the inauguration.

The 24-Hour Economy framework was also pre-positioned for international engagement during the transition. The President-Elect's communications team conducted briefings for the Chinese, German, and United States missions in Accra, framing the 24-Hour Economy as an investment-friendly framework consistent with continuing bilateral economic engagement and with the IMF programme. The framing was strategically important: the doctrine had been characterised in some 2024-campaign-era commentary as a populist labour-policy frame that could be in tension with IMF programme constraints, and the pre-inauguration diplomatic briefings were designed to manage that perception.

3. The 7 January 2025 Inauguration and the Inaugural Address

3.1 The Ceremony at Independence Square

The inauguration of John Dramani Mahama as the fifth President of the Fourth Republic of Ghana (after Rawlings 1993-2001, Kufuor 2001-2009, Mills 2009-2012, Mahama I 2012-2017, and Akufo-Addo 2017-2025) took place at Independence Square (Black Star Square) in Accra on Tuesday, 7 January 2025, beginning at approximately 09:30 GMT. The ceremony was structured under the protocol of the Presidential Transition Act, the Standing Orders of Parliament, and the customary practice that had evolved across previous Fourth-Republic inaugurations. The Chief Justice, Her Ladyship Justice Gertrude Torkornoo (whose Akufo-Addo-era appointment continued past the change of government), administered the Presidential Oath of Office and the Oath of Allegiance. President-Elect Mahama placed his left hand on the Holy Bible held by his wife, the First Lady Lordina Mahama, and recited the prescribed oath in English.

Vice-President-Elect Prof Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast and the first woman to occupy the Vice-Presidency of the Fourth Republic, was sworn in immediately after the President. Her swearing-in was historically resonant: Ghana had previously been governed by male presidents and male vice-presidents through the Fourth Republic, and Prof Opoku-Agyemang's elevation to the Vice-Presidency closed a thirty-three-year gap in the gender composition of the executive branch. The Vice-President-Elect had previously served as Minister of Education in Mahama's first administration (2013–2017) and as the NDC's vice-presidential running mate in the 2020 election.

The diplomatic guest list at the inauguration included Heads of State from Liberia (President Joseph Boakai), Sierra Leone (President Julius Maada Bio), Togo (President Faure Gnassingbé), Nigeria (President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, as ECOWAS Chair), and several other West African and continental African leaders; the inauguration was attended by the ECOWAS Commission President, by the African Union Commission Chair, and by ambassadorial delegations from China, the United States (which was in the final days of the Biden administration), the United Kingdom, the European Union, Germany, France, India, Japan, and Korea. The outgoing President Akufo-Addo attended the ceremony in person and exchanged the traditional handshake-and-photograph with the new President at the conclusion of the swearing-in — a continuation of the Ghanaian custom of orderly inter-party handover that had defined the Fourth Republic.

The military ceremonial component — the inspection of the Guard of Honour mounted by the Ghana Armed Forces, the 21-gun salute, the playing of the National Anthem, and the formal presentation of the Sword of State — was conducted under the supervision of the Chief of Defence Staff. The ceremony concluded with the traditional state banquet at Jubilee House, attended by the diplomatic corps, religious leaders, and the National House of Chiefs.

3.2 The Inaugural Address — Five Pillars of the Reset

The inaugural address, delivered from the dais at Independence Square at approximately 11:15 GMT and lasting forty-eight minutes, was the notable policy document of the inauguration. The address was structured around five enumerated "pillars" of the Reset agenda, each receiving a sustained policy-and-rhetorical treatment:

Pillar one — The 24-Hour Economy. The President characterised the post-2022 unemployment crisis as the central political-economic challenge inherited from the predecessor administration and proposed the 24-Hour Economy framework as the structural response. He committed to operationalising the framework within the first 120 days, to publishing the sectoral-mapping document within the first 180 days, and to introducing legislative-and-fiscal-incentives measures in the March 2025 Budget.

Pillar two — Operation Recover All Loot. The President characterised ORAL as a continuation of the ongoing transition work and committed to making the public-submissions mechanism permanently available through the presidency. He distinguished between the recovery objective (the return of misappropriated assets to the state) and the prosecution objective (the criminal accountability of named individuals), arguing that the two objectives would be pursued through distinct institutional channels — recovery through the Attorney-General and civil-recovery proceedings, prosecution through the Special Prosecutor and the criminal-justice process.

Pillar three — The abolition of nuisance taxes. The President committed to the abolition of the e-Levy, the betting tax, the emissions tax, and the progressive reduction of the COVID-19 Health Recovery Levy, in implementation of the 2024 NDC manifesto. He framed the commitment within the broader fiscal-policy context: revenue mobilisation would proceed through enhanced tax administration, the closure of revenue leakages identified by the Auditor-General's reports, and a Growth and Sustainability Levy on high-margin sectors, rather than through new transactional taxes on ordinary citizens.

Pillar four — Constitutional Review and a 2026 mid-term referendum. The President committed to reviving the Constitution Review Commission established under his first administration in 2010 and to introducing a constitutional-reform referendum at the mid-term of his presidency — provisionally identified as the second quarter of 2026 — that would address (i) the Article 71-holders' remuneration framework (the salaries and emoluments of constitutional office-holders, a long-standing political controversy); (ii) the Chapter 8 provisions on decentralisation, with particular reference to the question of partisan local-government elections; and (iii) selected provisions of the Constitution that had been identified for amendment by the 2010 Commission's report.

Pillar five — Galamsey eradication. The President committed to a comprehensive galamsey-eradication programme combining enforcement (the reactivation and intensification of Operation Halt II), regulatory consolidation (the proposed National Galamsey Eradication Authority), ecological rehabilitation (the Pra-Birim-Ankobra-Densu river basins), and economic alternatives (community-mining schemes and rural-employment programmes). He committed to the formal repeal of the Akufo-Addo-era L.I. 2462 permitting small-scale mining in forest reserves under presidential warrant.

The five pillars were complemented by commitments on education (the protection of the Free Senior High School programme established under Akufo-Addo, with a "Free SHS Plus" expansion to cover ancillary costs), on health (the operationalisation of the Mahamadu Bawumia-era reforms to the National Health Insurance Scheme without prejudice to their predecessor authorship), on the energy sector (a commitment to renegotiate selected Independent Power Producer contracts identified as fiscally onerous), and on foreign policy (continuing IMF programme engagement, continuing ECOWAS engagement on the AES question, and a "non-aligned" engagement with the global great powers).

3.3 Immediate Executive Instruments

In the hours and days immediately following the inauguration, the new President issued a series of Executive Instruments and administrative directives that implemented the five-pillars frame at the institutional level:

Executive Instrument 1 (7 January 2025): Suspension of the construction of the National Cathedral and the establishment of a forensic audit of the project's expenditure to date. The Cathedral, an Akufo-Addo-era initiative whose foundations had been laid at the John Evans Atta Mills Heritage site and whose construction had been suspended in mid-2023 amid funding controversy, had become a symbol of the contested-expenditure record of the predecessor administration. The forensic audit was assigned to the Office of the Auditor-General.

Executive Instrument 2 (8 January 2025): Establishment of the 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development Secretariat as a presidential agency, with Hon. Augustus Tanoh as the inaugural Director. The Secretariat was given a four-year operational mandate aligned with the presidential term and a budget allocation to be confirmed in the March 2025 Budget cycle.

Executive Instrument 3 (10 January 2025): Establishment of an Inter-Ministerial Galamsey Eradication Task Force, co-chaired by the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources and the Minister of Defence, with operational deployment of the Ghana Armed Forces and the Ghana Police Service under a unified-command framework.

Administrative directive (12 January 2025): Suspension of all post-7-December-2024 procurement contracts entered into by the outgoing administration, pending review by the incoming Cabinet. The directive — announced by the Chief of Staff Hon. Julius Debrah after the formal cabinet swearing-in — was contested by the NPP minority and produced a sustained legislative debate in the Ninth Parliament. The directive was subsequently moderated in February 2025 to apply to contracts above a stated value threshold.

Administrative directive (15 January 2025): Suspension of all sole-source procurement under the Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663), pending review of the Public Procurement Authority's records of post-2017 sole-source awards. The directive was articulated as an interim measure rather than a permanent abolition of sole-source procurement, which is statutorily permitted under specified conditions.

Administrative directive (16 January 2025): Establishment of a Presidential Advisory Council on the Economy, chaired by Prof Joe Amoako-Tuffour (a former adviser at the African Center for Economic Transformation, ACET, and a senior economic-policy specialist with prior IMF-engagement experience) and including senior Ghanaian and diasporic economists. The Council was structured as a non-statutory advisory body reporting to the President.

The cumulative effect of the immediate executive instruments was to establish, within the first ten days of the second Mahama presidency, the institutional architecture for the Reset agenda's principal pillars. The legislative-implementation work — particularly the abolition of the nuisance taxes and the National Galamsey Eradication Authority Bill — awaited the cabinet's formal swearing-in and the engagement of Parliament.

4. The Reset Cabinet (January–March 2025)

4.1 The 22 January 2025 First Tranche of Ministerial Nominations

The first considerable tranche of ministerial nominations was gazetted on 9 January 2025 and announced publicly on 22 January 2025, comprising nineteen senior portfolios. The list was deliberately curated to demonstrate three signalling priorities: (i) experienced Mahama-era hands in macroeconomic and security positions; (ii) generationally new appointees in social-policy and communications positions; (iii) regional and ethnic balance reflecting the NDC's national-coalition coverage.

The headline appointments were:

Hon. Dr Cassiel Ato Forson — Minister of Finance. Forson, the Member of Parliament for Ajumako-Enyan-Esiam in the Central Region and the outgoing Minority Leader of the Eighth Parliament, had served as Deputy Minister of Finance in Mahama's first administration (2013–2017) and had become the NDC's principal parliamentary spokesperson on the economy during the Akufo-Addo years. His appointment to Finance was widely anticipated and was received with relative continuity-of-confidence by the IMF country team, the bondholder community, and the international financial institutions.

Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa — Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration. Ablakwa, the Member of Parliament for North Tongu and a leading anti-corruption parliamentary investigator during the Akufo-Addo years (associated with the public-disclosure work on the Agyapa Royalties transaction, the National Cathedral expenditure, and selected presidential-travel costs), was appointed to Foreign Affairs at a relatively young age (44) and with no prior cabinet experience. The appointment was read as a deliberate generational-signalling choice and as a foreign-policy pivot toward the diaspora and anti-corruption agendas.

Hon. Edward Omane Boamah — Minister of Defence. Omane Boamah, the Member of Parliament for Akwatia (a 2024 NDC gain from the NPP in the Eastern Region) and Mahama's first-term Communications Minister (2013–2017), was appointed to Defence at a politically sensitive moment given the security architecture's role in galamsey enforcement and the post-AES regional security trajectory.

Hon. Dr Dominic Akuritinga Ayine — Attorney-General and Minister of Justice. Ayine, the Member of Parliament for Bolgatanga East and a constitutional-law specialist who had served as Deputy Attorney-General under Mahama's first administration, was appointed to a portfolio whose prosecutorial responsibilities — particularly in the ORAL pipeline — would be politically consequential. The Mahama Ayariga commentary that had circulated during the campaign as the likely Attorney-General nominee was incorrect: Hon. Ayariga was appointed to a separate portfolio, though the precise final assignment remains [TBD-VERIFY: gazetted assignment to be confirmed; the campaign-period speculation pointed to Inner Cabinet or Special Initiatives, and the final assignment should be checked against the January 2025 gazette].

Hon. John Abdulai Jinapor — Minister of Energy and Green Transition. Jinapor, the Member of Parliament for Yapei-Kusawgu (Northern Region) and Mahama's first-term Deputy Minister of Energy (2014–2017), was appointed to a renamed portfolio that combined the traditional Energy Ministry's responsibilities with a Green Transition agenda — an institutional signal of the renewable-energy and energy-transition emphasis in the manifesto.

Hon. Eric Opoku — Minister of Food and Agriculture. Opoku, the Member of Parliament for Asunafo South (Ahafo Region) and a senior NDC parliamentarian, was appointed to a portfolio whose principal first-year challenges would be the cocoa-sector trajectory (post-2024 production decline, COCOBOD restructuring under the IMF programme, climate-and-disease impacts) and the agro-processing component of the 24-Hour Economy framework.

Hon. Haruna Iddrisu — Minister of Education. Iddrisu, the Member of Parliament for Tamale South and a long-serving NDC parliamentarian who had served as Minority Leader during the Akufo-Addo years (preceding Forson in that role), was appointed to Education at a moment when the Free SHS programme — Akufo-Addo's defining social-policy legacy — required continued operational stewardship.

Hon. Dr Kwabena Mintah Akandoh — Minister of Health. Akandoh, the Member of Parliament for Juaboso (Western North Region) and a senior NDC health-policy parliamentarian, was appointed to a portfolio whose principal first-quarter challenges would be the post-Trump-2 PEPFAR and USAID funding shock (which threatened HIV antiretroviral supplies) and the operational stewardship of the National Health Insurance Scheme.

Hon. Joseph Bukari Nikpe — Minister of Transport. Nikpe, a Northern Region NDC parliamentarian, was appointed to a portfolio whose first-quarter agenda included the resumption of public-transport reforms and the operational review of the Pwalugu Multipurpose Dam project (which had transport-and-logistics implications for the North).

Hon. Ahmed Ibrahim — Minister for Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs. Ibrahim, a senior NDC parliamentarian and former Deputy Whip, was appointed to a portfolio that combined the decentralisation agenda with the chieftaincy-affairs file at a moment when the Dagbon and Asanteman thrones each had specific institutional engagement priorities.

Hon. Emelia Naa Momo Lartey — Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection. Lartey, a senior NDC women's-wing leader and parliamentarian, was appointed to a portfolio whose first-quarter agenda would include the operationalisation of the Women's Development Bank legislation and the broader social-protection programming.

Hon. Felix Kwakye Ofosu — Minister for Government Communications. Kwakye Ofosu, a senior NDC strategist and parliamentarian who had served as a Deputy Minister of Information under Mahama's first administration, was appointed to a portfolio that institutionalised the government's communications-coordination function (parallel to the Information Ministry under a separate appointee).

The remaining first-tranche appointments covered the Ministries of Lands and Natural Resources (the galamsey-enforcement portfolio), Trade and Industry, Roads and Highways, Works, Housing and Water Resources, Sanitation, Tourism Arts and Culture, Youth Development and Empowerment, and Chieftaincy Affairs (the latter under a re-designated portfolio).

4.2 The Parliamentary Vetting Process: Eighth Parliament Appointments Committee

The Appointments Committee of the Eighth Parliament — under the established constitutional convention that the outgoing Parliament's committees continue to function until the new Parliament's committees are reconstituted — conducted the vetting of the first-tranche nominees between 23 January 2025 and 12 February 2025. The Committee was chaired by First Deputy Speaker Bernard Ahiafor (NDC, Akatsi South) and operated under the Standing Orders of Parliament.

The vetting sessions, conducted in open hearings broadcast by the Parliament Channel and by Joy News, GTV, and Citi TV, were extensive: most senior nominees were examined for between four and six hours each across two-day sessions. The meaningful interrogation topics included (i) conflicts-of-interest declarations and asset-disclosure compliance under the Public Office Holders (Declaration of Assets and Disqualification) Act, 1998 (Act 550); (ii) post-2017 contract-and-procurement-history disclosures (an emergent vetting convention with relevance to the ORAL agenda); (iii) ministerial-priorities articulations for the first year; (iv) academic-credential and prior-public-statement scrutiny.

Three nominees attracted sustained interrogation. Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa was examined extensively on his prior parliamentary investigations of Akufo-Addo-era expenditure and on his proposed posture toward continuing those lines of inquiry from the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Hon. Dr Cassiel Ato Forson was examined on the financing arithmetic of the proposed nuisance-tax abolition and on his commitment to the IMF primary-surplus target. Hon. Dr Dominic Ayine was examined on the prosecutorial-independence framework that would govern the ORAL cases. No nomination was rejected, a function of the NDC supermajority in the Eighth Parliament's continuing committees; all nineteen first-tranche nominees were confirmed by the Committee's reports to the plenary and by plenary approval between 8 and 12 February 2025.

The vetting process was complemented by the formal constitution of the Ninth Parliament's committees in February–March 2025 under Speaker Bagbin's chairmanship. The second-tranche ministerial nominations — covering deputy-ministerial positions and selected late-announced senior portfolios — were vetted by the newly constituted Ninth Parliament Appointments Committee in February–March 2025, with confirmation completed by the end of March.

4.3 Cabinet Size and Sub-Ministerial Architecture

Mahama's pre-election commitment to a "lean" cabinet of no more than sixty senior and deputy ministerial positions was material delivered. The final cabinet architecture as constituted by the end of the first hundred days comprised approximately 56 positions, distributed across 23 senior ministerial portfolios and approximately 33 deputy ministerial positions [TBD-VERIFY: the precise count varies across sources; the headline commitment of "sixty or fewer" was met but the exact final count should be confirmed against the gazetted appointments]. This represented a reduction of approximately 50% against the Akufo-Addo cabinet's 123 senior-and-deputy positions and a return to the cabinet sizes of the Mills (2009–2012) and first-term Mahama (2012–2017) administrations.

The compactness was achieved partly through portfolio consolidations. The Information Ministry was merged with selected functions of the previous Information and Communications portfolio; the Special Development Initiatives Ministry of the Akufo-Addo era was abolished, with its functions absorbed by the Local Government and Finance ministries; the Senior Citizens portfolio was integrated into Gender, Children and Social Protection; selected regional-development portfolios (Middle Belt Development Authority, Northern Development Authority, Coastal Development Authority) were placed under direct Office-of-the-President supervision rather than separate ministerial offices.

The cabinet's regional composition reflected the NDC's national-coalition coverage: ministers were drawn from all sixteen regions, with the Northern and Volta regions over-represented relative to population (reflecting the historic NDC stronghold pattern), the Greater Accra region represented at near-proportional weight, and the Ashanti region represented through Hon. Eric Opoku and selected other appointments (the Ashanti representation having been historically a challenge for NDC cabinets given the region's NPP voting pattern). The cabinet's gender composition included Prof Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang as Vice-President, Hon. Emelia Naa Momo Lartey at Gender, and several other women appointees across senior and deputy positions [TBD-VERIFY: precise gender composition figures; the manifesto had committed to 30% women in ministerial appointments, and the post-March 2025 composition's gender count should be confirmed].

The Office of the Vice-President was structured under Prof Opoku-Agyemang with specific portfolios delegated to her by the President, including the chairmanship of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Women's Empowerment, the Ghana Education Trust Fund Board, and selected presidential-initiatives oversight roles. The Office of the President's senior-staff architecture comprised Hon. Julius Debrah as Chief of Staff, Hon. Stan Dogbe as a Senior Presidential Adviser, and a designated National Security Adviser whose appointment was confirmed in February 2025.

4.4 Strategic Appointments — Cross-Cutting Reading

Four appointments were structurally consequential for the first-hundred-days agenda and warrant cross-cutting analytical attention.

Hon. Dr Cassiel Ato Forson at Finance anchored the macroeconomic-credibility architecture. Forson's prior parliamentary record as a forensic critic of the Akufo-Addo-era fiscal management, combined with his deep technical command of the IMF programme architecture and his measured public communication style, generated relatively rapid market confidence. The cedi's appreciation trajectory through Q1 2025 (see §11.1) was attributed in part to the credibility effect of his Budget Statement delivery. His policy posture — articulated in interviews with the Financial Times, Reuters, and Bloomberg during January–February 2025 — was structured around three commitments: (i) the IMF programme would be honoured to completion; (ii) the nuisance-tax abolition would be financed through expenditure restraint and revenue-administration improvement rather than through new transactional taxes; (iii) the post-2024 macroeconomic stabilisation would be deepened rather than reversed by the Reset agenda.

Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa at Foreign Affairs anchored the diaspora-and-accountability architecture. His foreign-policy posture in the first hundred days emphasised (i) the continuation of the "Beyond the Return" diaspora-engagement programme inherited from the Akufo-Addo administration, with a re-orientation toward investment-promotion; (ii) the consolidation of Ghana's ECOWAS-mediation role on the AES question (under the President's continuing mandate); (iii) the management of the Trump-2 administration's policy turbulence (USAID cuts, PEPFAR uncertainty, the broader tariff agenda); and (iv) the deepening of the China bilateral relationship, particularly on the post-restructuring debt-servicing framework and on Belt and Road Initiative re-engagement.

Hon. John Abdulai Jinapor at Energy and Green Transition anchored the energy-sector reform agenda. His first-quarter ministerial posture, articulated in a series of public briefings and parliamentary appearances, identified four priority lines: (i) the ECG receivables crisis (the chain of payment arrears between the Electricity Company of Ghana, the Volta River Authority, the Independent Power Producers, and the gas suppliers); (ii) the IPP-contract review (with specific reference to the Karpowership, AKSA, and CENIT contracts identified in the 2022 ESLA and ECRP reviews as fiscally onerous); (iii) the gas-to-power-and-LNG trajectory; and (iv) the renewable-energy-and-off-grid programme.

Hon. Dr Dominic Ayine as Attorney-General anchored the legal-recovery architecture. His first-quarter posture combined (i) the operationalisation of the ORAL prosecution pipeline (with formal Memoranda of Understanding between the Attorney-General's Department, the Office of the Special Prosecutor, EOCO, and the Bureau of National Investigations); (ii) the review of pending litigation inherited from the predecessor administration; (iii) the legislative-drafting workload for the Reset agenda's legislative pillars; and (iv) the prosecutorial-independence framework that would govern the more politically sensitive ORAL cases.

The four-anchor reading underscores a structural feature of the Reset cabinet: the Mahama administration prioritised the alignment of marked technical capacity with politically consequential portfolios, rather than the broader patronage-distribution architecture that had characterised some prior Fourth-Republic cabinets. The trade-off was a relatively narrower internal-NDC patronage benefit, which produced some intra-party tensions through the first hundred days that were managed through the Office of the President's coordinating function.

5. The 27 February 2025 State of the Nation Address

5.1 The Inheritance Narrative

The first State of the Nation Address (SONA) of the second Mahama presidency was delivered to the Ninth Parliament on Thursday, 27 February 2025, beginning at 10:00 GMT and lasting approximately one hour and forty minutes. The Address was the principal policy document of the post-inauguration period and was structured under three architectural themes: the inheritance, the Reset, and the road to 2028.

The inheritance narrative occupied approximately the first third of the Address and was the most pointed inheritance critique delivered by a Fourth-Republic president since the 1993 inauguration of Rawlings's civilian presidency had referenced the Provisional National Defence Council's preceding work. The President characterised the macroeconomic inheritance as comprising (i) a sovereign debt stock that had reached 88% of GDP by November 2022 (the immediate pre-IMF figure, before the DDEP and external-debt restructuring reduced the present-value-of-debt ratio); (ii) cumulative consumer-price increases of approximately 130% across 2021–2024 against nominal-wage adjustments of approximately 65% (a real-wage erosion the Address characterised as the principal cost-of-living crisis facing Ghanaian households); (iii) cumulative IMF tranche disbursements of approximately USD 2.4 billion through April 2025 against the USD 3.0 billion programme envelope, indicating that the recovery would continue to require IMF-programme discipline through 2026; (iv) the cumulative cost of the energy-sector receivables (the legacy ECG-VRA-IPP-gas chain of arrears, estimated at over USD 2 billion); and (v) the documented Auditor-General findings of approximately ₵11.9 billion in irregular financial transactions across the 2017–2023 audit period.

The inheritance narrative also addressed three institutional findings that became politically consequential through the first hundred days: (i) the discovery, through transition-team document reviews, of pending procurement contracts awarded in the post-7-December-2024 period totalling approximately ₵4.6 billion that the administrative directive of 12 January 2025 had suspended pending review [TBD-VERIFY: the ₵4.6 billion headline figure appeared in the Address and in subsequent Finance Ministry briefings; precise contract-level disaggregation has not been comprehensively published]; (ii) the documented under-funding of the National Health Insurance Authority by approximately ₵5.0 billion in unpaid claim-reimbursements; and (iii) the documented under-funding of the Free SHS programme's per-capita allocation, with implications for the supplementary-budget cycle.

The inheritance narrative was carefully calibrated rhetorically: the President avoided personalised attack on the outgoing President Akufo-Addo (whose inauguration-day handshake had been a recurrent media image of the transition's civility) and located the inheritance critique in institutional and policy terms rather than personal-corruption terms. The personal-corruption-and-recovery file was firewalled to the ORAL pipeline and was not the principal rhetorical line of the SONA.

5.2 Policy Commitments and the Hundred-Day Frame

The middle portion of the Address articulated the policy programme for the first year, organised around the five pillars introduced at the inauguration and supplemented by specific time-bound commitments. The "Hundred Days" frame, which would become the principal communication architecture through to mid-April 2025, was introduced in this portion of the Address: the President committed to publishing a Hundred-Day Report on 16 April 2025 and identified seven deliverables expected within that window:

(i) The 11 March 2025 Budget Statement, with the abolition of the e-Levy, betting tax, and emissions tax legislated; (ii) the operationalisation of the 24-Hour Economy Secretariat with the first sectoral-implementation framework published; (iii) the establishment of the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) by executive instrument with subsequent statutory underpinning; (iv) the publication of an ORAL Hundred-Day Report; (v) the operational reactivation of Operation Halt II under the unified Inter-Ministerial Task Force; (vi) the IMF Fourth Review's completion; and (vii) the formal opening of the Constitution Review consultation process.

Each commitment was specified with a named lead minister (Forson, Tanoh, the Energy Minister Jinapor, the Attorney-General Ayine, the Lands Minister, the Finance Minister jointly with the Bank of Ghana Governor, and the Vice-President Prof Opoku-Agyemang respectively) and a reporting-date commitment. The format was a deliberate departure from the broader policy-vision idiom of prior SONAs: the seven-deliverable architecture made the Hundred-Day Report a measurable accountability document rather than a rhetorical milestone.

The Address also articulated longer-horizon commitments: the introduction of the National Galamsey Eradication Authority Bill in March 2025; the establishment of the Women's Development Bank within the first six months; the renegotiation of selected IPP contracts within the first year; the convening of a National Education Forum in the second half of 2025; the publication of a comprehensive Industrial Policy update integrated with the 24-Hour Economy framework; and the 2026 mid-term Constitutional Referendum.

5.3 Opposition Response (Bawumia, Afenyo-Markin)

The Minority Leader Hon. Alexander Afenyo-Markin (NPP, Effutu) delivered the formal Minority response to the Address on 4 March 2025 in a sitting of the Ninth Parliament. The response constituted the most significant articulation of the post-defeat NPP position on the second Mahama presidency. Three lines of critique organised the response:

First, the continuity-of-claim critique: the response argued that the macroeconomic stabilisation the Address had inherited had been delivered by the predecessor administration's IMF programme work, the DDEP, and the external-debt restructuring, and that the Mahama administration's first-quarter macro-improvements (cedi appreciation, inflation decline) were continuations of that trajectory rather than achievements of the new administration. The response specifically cited the November 2024 closure of the Eurobond Exchange (under outgoing Finance Minister Amin Adam) as the immediate antecedent of the post-inauguration market normalisation.

Second, the fiscal-irresponsibility critique: the response argued that the abolition of the nuisance taxes constituted a revenue loss of approximately ₵6 billion against a 2025 fiscal envelope already constrained by the IMF programme's primary-surplus target, that the offsetting revenue-administration measures were rhetorical rather than operationally credible, and that the Budget's compensating Growth and Sustainability Levy and reinstated road tolls would prove fiscally insufficient. The response predicted a mid-year supplementary tax measure that would partially reverse the nuisance-tax abolition — a prediction that became a continuing political-rhetorical reference point through the year.

Third, the vindictive-prosecution critique of ORAL: the response characterised ORAL as a political-prosecution instrument that operated outside the constitutional architecture of the Office of the Special Prosecutor (established under Act 959 of 2017) and the Economic and Organised Crime Office (established under Act 804 of 2010). The response specifically argued that the Committee's chair, businessman Daniel Ofori, lacked the prosecutorial training and legal-procedural framework appropriate to a recovery body, and that the public-submissions mechanism would generate due-process challenges in subsequent prosecutions.

Bawumia, who as the defeated presidential candidate of the NPP and as the outgoing Vice-President did not have a parliamentary platform from which to respond, delivered his own post-SONA commentary through a series of public addresses at NPP forums and through long-form interviews on Joy News and Asaase Radio in March 2025. The Bawumia commentary emphasised three themes: (i) the personal grace with which he had conceded the December 2024 election and his commitment to a peaceful and constructive opposition; (ii) the comparative framing of his own pre-election economic-management proposals (the so-called "Bold Solutions" platform of the 2024 NPP manifesto) against the Mahama Reset agenda; (iii) the long-horizon NPP rebuilding agenda toward the 2028 election.

The Bagbin Speaker chair, in re-affirming a 2023-era ruling on the conduct of SONA debates, ensured a structured parliamentary response window that ran through early March 2025 and that produced an extensive Hansard record of cross-bench engagement on the policy programme. The plenary debate on the Address concluded on 6 March 2025 with a resolution endorsing the Address's policy programme by majority vote.

6. The 11 March 2025 "Resetting" Budget

6.1 Cassiel Ato Forson's First Budget — Headline Figures

The 2025 Budget Statement was delivered to the Ninth Parliament by Finance Minister Hon. Dr Cassiel Ato Forson on Tuesday, 11 March 2025, beginning at 13:30 GMT and lasting approximately four hours including the question-and-answer portion. The Budget was titled "Resetting the Economy for the Ghana We Want" and was structured under five chapters covering (i) the global and regional economic context; (ii) the inheritance and the macro-fiscal stance; (iii) revenue and expenditure policy; (iv) sectoral programming; and (v) the medium-term framework.

The headline figures, as articulated in the Budget Statement and the accompanying Appropriations Bill:

• Total revenue and grants: projected at approximately ₵227 billion for FY 2025 (representing approximately 16.0% of GDP) [TBD-VERIFY: precise headline figure subject to confirmation against the Appropriations Act as enacted]
• Total expenditure: projected at approximately ₵256 billion (approximately 18.1% of GDP)
• Overall fiscal deficit (cash basis): projected at approximately 3.1% of GDP
• Primary balance (commitment basis): targeted at a surplus of approximately 1.5% of GDP, in line with the IMF programme's quantitative performance criterion for FY 2025
• Public-debt-to-GDP: projected to decline from approximately 70% (end-2024) to approximately 65% (end-2025), continuing the post-restructuring trajectory
• Real GDP growth: projected at approximately 4.4% for 2025, against a 2024 outturn of approximately 5.7%
• End-period inflation: targeted at approximately 11.9% for end-2025, against a January 2025 starting point of approximately 23.2%

The deficit-and-primary-surplus arithmetic was the central technical commitment of the Budget. The combination of (i) the abolition of the nuisance taxes (revenue loss of approximately ₵6 billion); (ii) the compensating revenue measures (Growth and Sustainability Levy expansion, restored road tolls, enhanced revenue-administration measures); (iii) expenditure restraint particularly on goods-and-services and selected capital lines; and (iv) the protected social-spending floors required under the IMF programme produced the targeted primary-surplus path.

6.2 The Tax-Handle Reset: E-Levy, Betting Tax, Emissions Tax, COVID Levy

The Budget's most politically consequential elements were the tax-handle changes, legislated through the accompanying Revenue Administration (Amendment) Act 2025 and through specific repeals of the underlying enabling Acts:

The E-Levy (Electronic Transfer Levy), introduced by the Akufo-Addo administration in 2022 at a 1.5% rate on electronic transfers above a daily threshold and modified subsequently to 1.0%, was abolished with effect from 1 April 2025 through the repeal of the Electronic Transfer Levy Act, 2022 (Act 1075). The E-Levy had generated approximately ₵2.0–2.2 billion annually in its 2023 and 2024 collection cycles, notable below the 2022 introduction-period revenue projection. The abolition was the manifesto's most prominent tax-policy commitment and was implemented within ninety days of the inauguration.

The Betting Tax, introduced through amendments to the Income Tax Act in 2023 as a 10% withholding tax on gross gaming winnings, was abolished from 1 April 2025. The revenue loss was estimated at approximately ₵180 million annually, and the abolition was framed in the Budget as a relief measure for the predominantly youthful constituency engaged in the legal-betting sector.

The Emissions Tax, introduced through the Emissions Levy Act, 2023 (Act 1112) as a vehicle-emissions levy on registered vehicles, was abolished from 1 April 2025. The revenue loss was estimated at approximately ₵400 million annually, and the abolition was framed as a cost-of-living relief measure pending the development of a more comprehensive environmental-fiscal architecture.

The COVID-19 Health Recovery Levy, introduced through the COVID-19 Health Recovery Levy Act, 2021 (Act 1068) at a 1% rate, was retained but subject to a phased reduction commitment. The Budget articulated a reduction trajectory aligned with the resolution of the COVID-era health-financing obligations, with full abolition committed to within the four-year term [TBD-VERIFY: the precise phasing schedule was specified in the Budget Statement but the legislative implementation of the phasing was deferred to subsequent budget cycles].

The cumulative revenue forgone — approximately ₵6.1 billion in headline annualised terms, approximately ₵4.6 billion in the FY 2025 partial-year impact — was offset through (i) an expanded Growth and Sustainability Levy (originally introduced as a 5% income-tax surcharge on banks and selected sectors under the Akufo-Addo administration, now extended to additional high-margin sectors at moderated rates); (ii) the restoration of road tolls under a digital-collection architecture (with revenue projections of approximately ₵800 million annually at steady state); (iii) enhanced revenue-administration measures targeting the closure of identified leakages in the Ghana Revenue Authority's operations; and (iv) expenditure restraint.

The Budget's tax-handle reset was assessed by the IMF Fourth Review as fiscally consistent with the programme's primary-surplus path, providing an institutional endorsement that had been politically consequential during the campaign period (when NPP commentary had characterised the nuisance-tax abolition as IMF-programme-incompatible).

6.3 Expenditure Allocations and the Social-Spending Floors

The expenditure side of the Budget reflected three architectural commitments: (i) the protection of the IMF-programme-mandated social-spending floors; (ii) the operationalisation of specific Reset-agenda initiatives; and (iii) the expenditure restraint required by the primary-surplus target.

The social-spending floors — covering the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) cash-transfer programme, the National Health Insurance Authority capitation and capitation-related transfers, the School Feeding Programme, and selected other social-protection lines — were strengthened against the 2024 baselines. LEAP coverage was expanded with a commitment to enrolling additional beneficiary households within the year, and the cash-transfer values were adjusted upward in light of the cumulative consumer-price increases since the 2022 levels.

The Free Senior High School programme, which had been the principal social-policy legacy of the Akufo-Addo administration, was reaffirmed and operationally strengthened. The Budget articulated a "Free SHS Plus" expansion that included (i) the strengthening of the per-capita capitation grant; (ii) the addressing of the documented "double-track" and "single-track" rotation pressures by phased infrastructure investment; (iii) the introduction of nutritional and welfare supplements; and (iv) the formalisation of the inclusion of children with disabilities. The Budget allocation for the Free SHS programme increased in nominal terms over the 2024 baseline.

The Reset-agenda initiatives received specific Budget allocations: the 24-Hour Economy Secretariat received an operational budget for its first full year; the Ghana Gold Board received a capitalisation allocation; the proposed National Galamsey Eradication Authority received a start-up allocation; the Women's Development Bank received a capitalisation commitment scheduled for delivery on the legislation's enactment; the Constitution Review Commission received an operational budget; the ORAL Committee received an operational allocation routed through the Office of the President.

The expenditure restraint affected (i) the goods-and-services line (selected non-priority operational expenditures across MDAs were compressed); (ii) the capital expenditure line (selected legacy capital projects, particularly those identified by ORAL as candidates for review, were placed on a re-prioritisation pathway); and (iii) the wage bill (which was held to the IMF programme's quantitative ceiling, with the public-sector wage adjustment for 2025 negotiated through the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission within the programme constraint).

6.4 The IMF Programme Reaffirmation and the Fourth Review

The Budget's fifth structural commitment — the reaffirmation of the IMF programme — was articulated through specific references to the quantitative performance criteria for end-March 2025 and end-June 2025, and through the alignment of the Budget's fiscal stance with the IMF Country Report's design. The Finance Minister's Budget Statement delivery included an explicit acknowledgment that the IMF programme would be honoured through to its scheduled completion in May 2026 and that the Mahama administration would not seek a fundamental programme renegotiation. The commitment was reiterated through the Budget Q&A and through Forson's subsequent press conferences.

The IMF Fourth Review, conducted by an IMF mission to Accra in late February and early March 2025 in parallel with the Budget preparation, concluded in April 2025 with the Executive Board's approval of the disbursement of the next tranche of approximately USD 360 million. The Fourth Review Country Report assessed (i) the FY 2024 fiscal outturn as having met the quantitative performance criteria with adjustments; (ii) the FY 2025 fiscal stance as designed in the Budget as consistent with the programme's medium-term targets; (iii) the structural benchmarks for end-March 2025 (including specific Bank of Ghana reform measures, public-financial-management measures, and energy-sector commitments) as considerable met; and (iv) the cumulative disbursement trajectory through to programme completion as on track.

The Fourth Review's positive verdict was politically consequential. It confirmed for international creditors and rating agencies that the change of government had not produced a programme rupture; it confirmed for domestic constituencies that the manifesto's nuisance-tax abolition could be delivered within the programme; and it provided the institutional foundation for the cedi-appreciation and Treasury-bill-yield-decline trajectories that defined the first hundred days' macro-improvements. The Review was the principal external-confidence-building output of the period.

7. The 24-Hour Economy Policy Architecture

7.1 The Doctrinal Origins (2023–2024 Manifesto Period)

The 24-Hour Economy doctrine emerged in the post-2022 NDC opposition-policy work as the principal positive-programme commitment intended to address Ghana's structural unemployment crisis. The doctrinal origins are traceable to a series of papers and public addresses by NDC strategists through 2023 and into the 2024 manifesto-drafting process. The principal authorial contribution is associated with Hon. Augustus "Goosie" Tanoh and a small group of economic-policy advisers including Prof Joe Amoako-Tuffour and senior figures from the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET), the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) of the University of Ghana, and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA-Ghana).

The doctrinal frame articulated three structural claims: (i) the Ghanaian economy's de facto operational architecture is single-shift in most sectors (manufacturing, agro-processing, services, and even much of port-and-logistics operations operate on eight-hour cycles), with the consequence that capital utilisation is structurally suboptimal and labour-absorption capacity is constrained; (ii) the structural unemployment rate, particularly the youth-unemployment-and-underemployment rate, can be materially reduced by enabling shifts to a two-shift or three-shift architecture in priority sectors through targeted fiscal, regulatory, and infrastructural incentives; (iii) the macroeconomic gains from such a shift — captured in higher capital utilisation, higher export receipts, and higher tax bases — would be self-financing within a medium-term framework.

The doctrine drew empirical reference from several comparative cases, including Mauritius's export-processing-zone trajectory through the 1980s and 1990s, Vietnam's post-Doi-Moi industrial-policy trajectory, and selected Mexican maquiladora-sector experiences. The 2024 NDC manifesto incorporated the 24-Hour Economy as a chapter-length commitment and identified twelve priority sub-sectors. The doctrine attracted critical attention during the 2024 campaign — IMANI Centre commentary by Bright Simons and Franklin Cudjoe characterised the framework as conceptually attractive but operationally under-specified, and CDD-Ghana's Kojo Asante raised questions on the political-economy feasibility of the targeted incentive architecture — but it also served as the most prominent positive-programme element of the NDC offer.

7.2 The Secretariat Under Augustus "Goosie" Tanoh

The 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development Secretariat was established by Executive Instrument on 8 January 2025 — the day after the inauguration — and was operationalised through January and February 2025 with Hon. Augustus Tanoh as the inaugural Director. The Secretariat's institutional design placed it within the Office of the President but with meaningful engagement responsibilities across the Ministries of Trade and Industry, Finance, Lands and Natural Resources, Energy and Green Transition, Communications and Digitalisation, and Food and Agriculture.

The Secretariat's first-quarter operational work comprised (i) the formal publication of the sectoral-mapping framework, completed in March 2025; (ii) the structured stakeholder consultations with the Association of Ghana Industries, the Ghana Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Trades Union Congress, the Ghana Employers Association, and the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre; (iii) the design of the fiscal-incentives framework, integrated into the March 2025 Budget; (iv) the institutional engagement with development partners on co-financing arrangements; and (v) the establishment of working-group mechanisms with the selected anchor enterprises in each priority sector.

Tanoh's senior advisory team included senior figures with prior public-sector and private-sector experience. The Secretariat was structured as a relatively compact institution — approximately 35 senior and technical positions in its initial establishment — with a deliberate emphasis on coordination and policy-design rather than direct implementation. The implementation work was distributed across the relevant ministries and agencies under the Secretariat's coordinating leadership.

7.3 GoldBod, the Goldcoast Bank Concept, and FX Stabilisation

The Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) was established by Executive Instrument in February 2025 and given statutory underpinning in the March 2025 Budget cycle through the Ghana Gold Board Act, 2025 (Act 1140) [TBD-VERIFY: the precise Act number for the GoldBod statute as enacted; the legislative passage was expected in the first half of 2025 and may have been completed in the late-Q1/early-Q2 window]. The institution's mandate consolidated the state's gold-purchasing-and-exporting activities through three channels: (i) the consolidation of the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme that the Bank of Ghana had operated since 2021 under a separate institutional architecture; (ii) the replacement of selected functions previously performed by the Precious Minerals Marketing Company in the small-scale-mining value chain; and (iii) the establishment of a unified state-led gold-export channel.

GoldBod's operational design comprises (i) regional gold-purchasing centres in the principal small-scale-mining areas (Ashanti, Western, Eastern, and selected Northern locations); (ii) a centralised assaying-and-purification facility at the Ghana Standards Authority's metallurgical laboratory; (iii) export channels through the Bank of Ghana's existing foreign-exchange operations; and (iv) revenue distribution to the participating small-scale miners on a transparent and timely basis. The Board's initial chair was a senior Ghanaian banker with prior experience at international bullion-trading institutions [TBD-VERIFY: the inaugural Board chair and the senior management appointments; these were gazetted in February-March 2025].

The macroeconomic impact of GoldBod through the first hundred days was material. The Bank of Ghana's gross international reserves position improved from approximately USD 8.9 billion (October 2024, the last pre-Mahama reading widely cited in commentary) to approximately USD 9.4 billion (April 2025) [TBD-VERIFY: precise reserves trajectory; the headline improvement is robust across sources but the precise monthly readings require source-confirmation]. A portion of the reserves improvement was attributable to GoldBod-channelled receipts smoothing the foreign-exchange supply. The cedi's Q1 2025 appreciation trajectory (see §11.1) was correspondingly supported, although the contributing factors also included the post-Eurobond-Exchange market normalisation, the IMF Fourth Review's confidence effect, and seasonal cocoa-export receipts.

The Goldcoast Bank concept, announced as a flagship 24-Hour-Economy financing institution, was at the conceptual-design stage through the end of the first hundred days. The proposed institution would operate as (i) a 24-Hour-Economy investment-and-working-capital financier for the priority sectors; (ii) a gold-backed-deposit institution serving the Ghanaian diaspora and domestic investors; and (iii) a co-financing partner with development finance institutions. The legislative drafting and the capitalisation architecture were under development through Q2 2025 and were not yet operational at the Hundred-Day mark.

7.4 Sectoral Mappings: Manufacturing, Agro-Processing, ICT/BPO, Financial Services

The Sectoral Mapping document, published by the Secretariat in March 2025, identified twelve priority sub-sectors and articulated for each (i) the diagnostic baseline (capital utilisation, labour-absorption capacity, export potential); (ii) the binding constraints to triple-shift operations (regulatory, financial, infrastructural, labour-supply); (iii) the targeted incentives architecture; and (iv) the timeline for implementation.

The manufacturing sector mapping identified textile-and-garment manufacturing, cement-and-construction materials, steel (with specific reference to the Tema-based Sentuo Steel facility), pharmaceuticals, and selected fast-moving consumer goods as the priority sub-sectors. The incentives architecture included (i) electricity-tariff concessions for triple-shift operations under a 24-Hour-Economy tariff schedule to be negotiated with the Electricity Company of Ghana and the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission; (ii) night-shift labour-cost subsidies under a temporary mechanism; (iii) accelerated capital-allowance treatment under selected provisions of the Income Tax Act; (iv) preferential access to GoldBod-channelled GH₵-denominated working-capital lines; and (v) coordinated infrastructural support (water, road access, security) at the principal industrial clusters.

The agro-processing sector mapping identified cocoa-processing (with a specific emphasis on the long-pending structural challenge of low domestic-processing rates against cocoa-bean export volumes), cashew, shea, palm oil, fruits and vegetables, and selected grains as the priority sub-sectors. The incentives architecture included specific provisions on raw-material aggregation, processing-incentives, and the coordination of the proposed 1D1F (One District One Factory) inheritance from the Akufo-Addo administration with the 24-Hour Economy framework. The 1D1F integration was a politically delicate question: the Akufo-Addo-era 1D1F programme had been a flagship initiative, and the Mahama administration's posture was to retain the surviving 1D1F facilities while integrating them into the new framework rather than terminating the predecessor programme.

The ICT/BPO sector mapping identified business-process outsourcing, software-development services, contact-centre services, and digital-content production as the priority sub-sectors. The Ghana Free Zones Authority's existing ICT-park architecture (Accra, Tema, and selected regional locations) was identified as the principal physical-infrastructural foundation; the proposed incentives included specific data-and-bandwidth subsidies and night-shift labour-cost provisions.

The financial-services sector mapping identified extended-hours banking operations, digital-financial-services 24-hour infrastructure, and capital-market operations as the principal areas. The mapping integrated the GoldBod and Goldcoast Bank architecture with the broader financial-services-sector strategy and addressed the post-DDEP rebuilding of capital-market depth through specific institutional measures coordinated with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Ghana Stock Exchange.

7.5 Industrial Anchors: Sentuo Steel, VALCO Revival, Aluminium Smelter Discussions

Three specific industrial-anchor projects received concentrated attention through the first hundred days as illustrative cases for the 24-Hour Economy framework:

Sentuo Steel Tema, the Chinese-owned integrated steel-and-rebar facility that had opened at Tema in 2023 under the Akufo-Addo administration's industrial-policy framework, was identified as a triple-shift candidate. The Secretariat conducted specific engagements with Sentuo Group on the conditions under which a triple-shift expansion would be commercially viable, including electricity-tariff stability, scrap-and-iron-ore feedstock supply, and export-market access. The Sentuo case became a politically illustrative test of the 24-Hour Economy framework: the facility's continuing operations, expansion, and triple-shift transition would serve as a visible demonstration of the framework's deliverability.

The Volta Aluminium Company (VALCO), the state-owned aluminium smelter at Tema established in the 1960s under Nkrumah's industrialisation programme and operationally suspended through much of the post-2000 period, was identified as a strategic re-activation candidate. VALCO's restart had been a recurrent policy commitment across multiple Ghanaian administrations and had been subject to feasibility-study work under the Akufo-Addo administration. The Mahama administration's commitment was to a structured re-engagement with the technical and commercial conditions for restart, including the resolution of (i) the electricity-tariff arrangement under which VALCO would operate (the smelter is a large electricity consumer and its tariff terms had been historically negotiated separately); (ii) the alumina-and-bauxite feedstock supply, with potential domestic linkages to the Ghana Integrated Aluminium Development Corporation's bauxite-development work; and (iii) the technology-and-capital partner architecture. No restart decision was taken in the first hundred days, but the Secretariat's engagement with the VALCO file was operationally re-launched.

Bauxite, aluminium, and the broader minerals-and-mining processing complex were referenced in the Secretariat's framework as a long-horizon industrial-development trajectory. The Akufo-Addo-era Ghana Integrated Aluminium Development Corporation (GIADEC) had been established under Act 976 of 2018 to consolidate the bauxite-alumina-aluminium value chain; the Mahama administration's posture was to retain GIADEC's institutional structure while reviewing the specific project-development pipeline.

The three anchor projects illustrated both the ambition and the operational constraints of the 24-Hour Economy framework. The framework's deliverability would depend material on the resolution of structural constraints — electricity supply and tariff stability, foreign-exchange-denominated feedstock costs, export-market access in a Trump-2-era tariff environment — that were not within the framework's direct control. The first-hundred-days output was the establishment of the framework, the publication of the sectoral mapping, and the initial-phase operationalisation of GoldBod, rather than the demonstration of triple-shift transition at scale.

8. Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL)

8.1 The Committee Architecture and Daniel Ofori's Role

The ORAL Committee, established by Mahama on 23 December 2024 during the transition period, was structured as a presidential committee operating under direct presidential authority rather than as a statutory body. The institutional placement was deliberate: a statutory body would have required parliamentary enactment of an establishment Act and would have been operationally delayed; a presidential committee could begin work immediately on the transition mandate. The trade-off was that the Committee's prosecutorial and asset-recovery outputs would require transmission to statutory bodies (the Attorney-General, the Office of the Special Prosecutor, EOCO, the police) for legal action.

Daniel Ofori, the inaugural ORAL chair, was a high-profile Ghanaian businessman and Ghana Stock Exchange investor with a public profile as a critic of the Akufo-Addo administration's handling of selected procurement and policy episodes. His pre-2024 public commentary had focused on the Saglemi housing project and on the broader question of state-owned-enterprise corporate-governance failures; his 2024 campaign engagement had included specific media appearances on the recovery agenda. The choice of Ofori as Committee chair signalled (i) the prioritisation of the recovery agenda's public-engagement function over its legal-procedural function; (ii) the Mahama administration's willingness to delegate marked recovery work to a public-private partnership model; (iii) the political-rhetorical positioning of the recovery agenda as a citizen-led rather than purely state-led initiative.

The Committee's institutional architecture comprised (i) a chair (Ofori) and approximately six core members drawn from the legal profession, civil society, forensic accounting, and public administration; (ii) a technical secretariat staffed by seconded officers from the Office of the President, the Attorney-General's Department, EOCO, and the Office of the Special Prosecutor; (iii) a public-engagement function (the submissions mechanism); and (iv) reporting lines to the President. The Committee did not have independent prosecutorial authority and operated as a triage-and-transmission mechanism rather than as a court-equivalent body.

8.2 The 10 February 2025 Preliminary Report

The ORAL Preliminary Report, published on 10 February 2025 — approximately seven weeks after the Committee's establishment — was the first significant public output of the recovery agenda. The Report comprised approximately 110 pages and was structured under four chapters: (i) the Committee's establishment, mandate, and methodology; (ii) the aggregate-level findings on submissions received; (iii) the priority-case identification; and (iv) the recommendations for the prosecution-and-recovery pipeline.

The aggregate findings disclosed approximately 2,417 public submissions received in the period 27 December 2024 to 31 January 2025. The submissions were distributed across categories of alleged misappropriation: (i) procurement and contract-award irregularities (approximately 38% of submissions); (ii) state-asset disposal irregularities (approximately 17%); (iii) public-financial-management irregularities (approximately 22%); (iv) extractive-sector irregularities (approximately 9%); (v) social-protection-programme irregularities (approximately 8%); (vi) other categories including identity-document irregularities, regulatory-action irregularities, and parastatal-governance irregularities (approximately 6%). The headline aggregate value-claim figure of approximately USD 21 billion was disclosed in the Report with the caveat that the figure represented the aggregate of submissions' headline value-claims rather than a forensic-accounting estimate of recoverable amounts.

The Report identified eleven priority cases for immediate transmission to the prosecution-and-recovery pipeline (§8.3 below) and approximately forty additional cases for further investigative work. The Report committed to a publication cycle of quarterly progress reports and to a final report at the completion of the Committee's mandate (provisionally identified as the end of 2026).

8.3 Specific Cases — Saglemi, Ambulance Procurement, National Cathedral, Agyapa, Sky Train, NLA, Pwalugu

The eleven priority cases identified in the February 2025 Preliminary Report included:

The Saglemi Affordable Housing Project. An affordable-housing project initiated under the Mills/Mahama-first-term administration in the early 2010s with a Brazilian-government-backed loan, the project's completion-and-occupancy trajectory had been the subject of a high-profile Auditor-General investigation under the Akufo-Addo administration that had identified irregularities in the project's procurement and contract management. The Akufo-Addo-era prosecution had been initiated and was procedurally pending at the change of government; the ORAL re-engagement was articulated as a forensic re-examination of both the original irregularities and the prosecution's subsequent conduct.

The National Ambulance Service Procurement. The 307-ambulance procurement under the Akufo-Addo administration's Free SHS/UHC complementary investment programme had been the subject of contemporary procurement-and-pricing controversy. The ORAL case file addressed allegations of pricing irregularities, of irregular sole-sourcing, and of post-delivery vehicle-fleet-management failures.

The National Cathedral. The Akufo-Addo-era National Cathedral project, the construction of which had been suspended in mid-2023 amid funding controversy, was the most politically symbolic of the ORAL priority cases. The project's expenditure trajectory had been the subject of a high-profile parliamentary investigation led by Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa (now Foreign Affairs Minister); the ORAL case file addressed the cumulative expenditure of approximately USD 58 million [TBD-VERIFY: the headline expenditure figure varies between Ablakwa's parliamentary submissions, the Auditor-General's reports, and the project's own published accounts; the most-cited consolidated figure is around USD 58 million but precise reconciliation requires source-checking].

The Agyapa Royalties Transaction. The proposed 2020 transaction under which the Akufo-Addo administration had sought to securitise future gold-royalty revenues through a Jersey-incorporated special-purpose vehicle had been notable controversial at the time and had been ultimately withdrawn from parliamentary consideration. The ORAL re-engagement addressed the transaction's design and the allegations of conflicts-of-interest in its preparation.

The Sky Train Concession. A 2018-vintage proposed concession for a mass-rapid-transit elevated rail system in Greater Accra, the Sky Train had been the subject of contemporary technical and financial-feasibility controversy. The ORAL case file addressed the concession-design irregularities and the related public-expenditure trajectory.

The National Lotteries Authority (NLA) Digital-Platform Contract. A 2018-era contract under which the NLA's digital-platform infrastructure had been outsourced to a private operator under terms that had been subsequently characterised by some commentary as fiscally unfavourable to the state. The ORAL case file addressed the contract-design and the revenue-sharing arrangement.

The Pwalugu Multipurpose Dam. The Northern Region multi-purpose dam project, conceptualised in the 2010s for irrigation, hydropower, and flood-control functions and revived under the Akufo-Addo administration with international-finance engagement, had been subject to procurement-and-disbursement irregularity allegations. The ORAL case file addressed the project's contracting and disbursement trajectory.

The remaining four priority cases addressed (i) a selected state-owned-enterprise governance failure; (ii) a selected COVID-19-era procurement; (iii) a selected extractive-sector concession; and (iv) a selected social-protection-programme procurement [TBD-VERIFY: the specific identities of the remaining four priority cases as disclosed in the February 2025 Preliminary Report; some priority cases were referenced in the Report without full naming for prosecutorial-protection reasons].

8.4 The Attorney-General/Special-Prosecutor Pipeline

The operational architecture of the prosecution-and-recovery pipeline was structured through Memoranda of Understanding signed in February 2025 between (i) the ORAL Committee and the Office of the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice; (ii) the ORAL Committee and the Office of the Special Prosecutor (the statutory anti-corruption prosecution body established under Act 959 of 2017 and headed at the change of government by Special Prosecutor Kissi Agyebeng, whose statutory term had continued past the change of government); (iii) the ORAL Committee and EOCO; and (iv) the ORAL Committee and the Criminal Investigations Department of the Ghana Police Service.

Under the architecture, ORAL transmitted case files with prima facie evidentiary support to the appropriate prosecution body based on the nature of the alleged offence: financial-crimes-and-money-laundering cases to EOCO; anti-corruption cases (involving public officials) to the Office of the Special Prosecutor; civil-recovery actions to the Attorney-General; criminal-law cases to the Criminal Investigations Department. The receiving body retained discretionary independence on the prosecutorial decision under the relevant statutory provisions.

The first-quarter prosecutorial output through April 2025 included the initiation of investigations into approximately seven of the eleven priority cases, the convening of formal investigative panels under EOCO and the Special Prosecutor, and the preliminary filings in the Saglemi-related civil-recovery proceedings. The criminal-prosecution outputs were expected to emerge through Q2 and Q3 2025; the first criminal indictments in the post-handover period were filed in late April 2025 in the Saglemi-related proceedings and were addressed to former senior officials of the housing-and-construction portfolio under the predecessor administration.

The prosecutorial-independence framework was structurally tested through the period by (i) the question of the Special Prosecutor Kissi Agyebeng's continuing tenure under the new administration (his statutory term continued, but his operational latitude was politically observed); (ii) the question of the Attorney-General Ayine's prosecutorial-decision-making in cases where the underlying facts had been the subject of his own pre-2025 public commentary; and (iii) the question of the judiciary's posture on the politically consequential cases as they progressed to court.

8.5 The "Vindictive Prosecution" Counter-Frame

The NPP-opposition characterisation of ORAL as a vindictive-prosecution instrument was articulated through three lines: (i) the institutional-design critique, which characterised ORAL's non-statutory structure and the chair's (Ofori) non-prosecutorial background as procedurally inappropriate to a recovery body; (ii) the case-selection critique, which characterised the prioritisation of specific Akufo-Addo-era cases over comparable Mahama-first-term-era cases (specifically the Mills/Mahama-era Saglemi project's inclusion was framed as politically self-protective) as politically selective; (iii) the due-process critique, which characterised the public-submissions mechanism's generation of allegations that subsequently informed prosecution as raising considerable due-process and evidentiary-admissibility questions.

The Akufo-Addo-era figures named in ORAL submissions and in the priority-case list responded individually and through legal counsel. Former senior officials of the predecessor administration, including former cabinet ministers in the relevant portfolios, retained Ghanaian senior counsel and prepared procedural responses to the investigative-panel summonses. Specific named former officials issued public statements characterising the ORAL allegations as politically motivated and committing to full procedural defence.

The Mahama administration's response to the counter-frame was articulated through (i) the Attorney-General's commitment to prosecutorial-independence in case-handling decisions; (ii) the publication of the ORAL Committee's procedural protocols and case-handling architecture; (iii) the Mahama public-address acknowledgments that ORAL would not be employed for political-prosecution purposes and that procedurally inappropriate cases would be discontinued. The administrative discipline of these commitments through the first hundred days was assessed by CDD-Ghana, IMANI, and the wider civil-society commentary as broadly observed though with continuing scrutiny.

The vindictive-prosecution frame would become the dominant NPP-opposition rhetorical posture through the year and would generate continuing political contestation around specific ORAL-derived prosecutions. The frame's analytical purchase among the broader Ghanaian public — as measured by Afrobarometer and CDD-Ghana survey work in subsequent waves — would be a key indicator of the political-durability of the recovery agenda.

9. Galamsey — Operation Halt II Reactivation and the National Galamsey Eradication Authority

9.1 The Inheritance — September 2024 Strike Wave to January 2025 Handover

The galamsey policy inheritance the Mahama administration assumed on 7 January 2025 was the most politically activated environmental-and-natural-resources file in Fourth-Republic Ghanaian history. The September 2024 strike wave — initiated by the Ghana Trades Union Congress and joined by the Ghana Medical Association, the Ghana Bar Association, and the Coalition Against Illegal Mining — had constituted the broadest civil-society mobilisation on a single environmental-policy question in the post-2000 period. The strike's specific demands had included the unconditional repeal of L.I. 2462 (the 2022 Akufo-Addo-era amendment to the Minerals and Mining Regulations that had permitted small-scale mining in forest reserves under presidential warrant), the indefinite suspension of all small-scale mining pending a comprehensive policy review, and the deployment of additional enforcement against operating galamsey sites.

The Akufo-Addo administration's late-2024 response had combined (i) the partial restoration of Operation Halt II deployments to selected sites; (ii) the announcement of a phased review of L.I. 2462 without commitment to immediate repeal; (iii) the resumption of selected community-mining-scheme operations under revised regulatory parameters; and (iv) the public engagement of the National House of Chiefs on the broader chieftaincy-and-land-rights dimensions of the question. The response had been assessed by the civil-society coalition as insufficient and had remained an active political-rhetorical contest through the campaign and into the post-election transition.

The Mahama campaign's October-November 2024 articulation of the galamsey policy had been explicit: full enforcement reactivation, regulatory consolidation under a dedicated National Galamsey Eradication Authority, ecological rehabilitation of the principal degraded river basins, and the unconditional repeal of L.I. 2462. The post-inauguration implementation of these commitments became the defining test of the administration's environmental-and-natural-resources credibility through the first hundred days.

9.2 Operation Galamstop (February–March 2025)

The reactivation and intensification of Operation Halt II — re-branded in some Mahama-administration communications as "Operation Galamstop", though the formal designation of "Operation Halt II" continued in the security-sector documentation — was operationalised through the Executive Instrument of 10 January 2025 establishing the Inter-Ministerial Galamsey Eradication Task Force. The Task Force was co-chaired by the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources (Hon. Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah) and the Minister of Defence (Hon. Edward Omane Boamah), with operational deployment by the Ghana Armed Forces and the Ghana Police Service under a unified command. The National Security Coordinator's office provided the coordination function.

Operational deployments in late January through March 2025 covered the principal galamsey-affected zones: the Atewa Range Forest Reserve (Eastern Region), the Apamprama Forest Reserve (Ashanti Region), the Tano-Anwia Forest Reserve (Western Region), the Subri River Forest Reserve (Western Region), the Bia Forest Reserve (Western North Region), the Pra River basin (cutting across the Western, Central, and Ashanti regions), the Ankobra River basin (Western Region), the Densu River basin (Eastern and Greater Accra regions), and the Birim River basin (Eastern Region). The operational outputs through the first hundred days included approximately [TBD-VERIFY: the precise figures for excavators seized, sites destroyed, and arrests made are reported in Ministry of Lands and Defence press releases through February-April 2025; the headline categories of equipment seizures and arrests are robust across sources but precise totals require source-confirmation; the publicly cited approximate range is several hundred excavators seized and several hundred arrests effected through Q1 2025].

The enforcement architecture was complemented by the deployment of additional Forestry Commission and EPA personnel to the principal sites for documentation and chain-of-custody management for the seized equipment. The seized equipment, particularly the high-value excavators, was retained at secured depots pending the formal forfeiture proceedings; the long-standing question of post-seizure equipment disposal — which had been a recurrent point of civil-society scrutiny under the predecessor administration's Halt II operations, with allegations that some seized equipment had been returned to operators — was addressed through the publication of a transparent custody-and-disposal protocol.

9.3 The Pra, Birim, Ankobra, Densu Rehabilitation Programme

The ecological-rehabilitation dimension of the galamsey policy was the most operationally complex of the policy lines and was articulated through a multi-year programme co-ordinated by the Forestry Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Ghana Water Company, and the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources. The Pra River basin, the most heavily degraded of the principal southern rivers, was identified as the priority target.

The technical baseline established through the Ghana Water Company's December 2024 water-quality studies had documented (i) cumulative turbidity readings meaningful exceeding the World Health Organization's potable-water standard across multiple monitoring sites; (ii) heavy-metal concentrations (mercury, lead, arsenic) at levels indicating active mining-related contamination; (iii) material sedimentation reducing the rivers' navigable and ecological capacity. The rehabilitation programme committed to (i) the cessation of active contamination through enforcement; (ii) the structured de-silting of selected high-impact sites through engineered intervention; (iii) the restoration of riparian vegetation through programmed replanting; (iv) the periodic monitoring-and-reporting of water-quality recovery.

The funding architecture for the rehabilitation programme combined Government of Ghana allocations under the March 2025 Budget with development-partner co-financing engagements with the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and selected bilateral partners (notably the Federal Republic of Germany through GIZ engagement, the United Kingdom through FCDO-funded technical-assistance, and the United States through pre-Trump-2-cuts USAID environmental programming, the post-cuts status of which became uncertain through Q1 2025).

The rehabilitation programme's first-hundred-days output was the establishment of the institutional architecture, the publication of the technical baseline, and the initiation of pilot de-silting operations at selected Pra River sites. The full-scale rehabilitation work would proceed through 2025-2027 and the documented water-quality recovery would constitute a key long-horizon indicator of the policy's effectiveness.

9.4 The Small-Scale Mining Moratorium Debate

The question of a comprehensive moratorium on small-scale mining — the most stringent of the policy options articulated through the September 2024 strike-wave — was the most politically contested element of the galamsey-policy architecture through the first hundred days. The civil-society coalition (Coalition Against Illegal Mining, GMA, Bar Association, TUC) pressed for an indefinite moratorium on all small-scale-mining licensing pending a comprehensive sectoral review. The Ghana National Association of Small-Scale Miners (GNASSM) pressed for the protection of legitimate small-scale operations and the focused targeting of unlicensed galamsey activity.

The Mahama administration's posture, articulated through the Lands Minister and through the President's own public statements, distinguished between (i) the unlicensed, environmentally destructive galamsey activity targeted for enforcement and prosecution; (ii) the legitimate licensed small-scale mining operations conducted under the Minerals and Mining (Small-Scale Mining) Regulations, 2013, that could continue under enhanced regulatory supervision; (iii) the community-mining schemes that could be expanded as economic alternatives to unlicensed galamsey for affected communities. The distinction was procedurally clear but operationally complex, given the documented over-lapping of licensed and unlicensed activity at many sites and the historical irregularities in the licensing-and-permitting process.

The first-hundred-days policy output was the announcement of a phased review of the small-scale-mining licensing framework, the suspension of new license issuances pending the review's completion, and the commitment to publish a comprehensive Small-Scale Mining Policy White Paper by Q3 2025. The unconditional moratorium that the civil-society coalition had sought was not implemented; the partial suspension of new licensing was characterised by some commentary as a compromise position that risked under-delivering on the campaign commitments.

The L.I. 2462 repeal — the most procedurally specific of the civil-society demands — was committed to in the SONA and in the Lands Minister's parliamentary appearances. The formal repeal process required Parliament's vote on a new Legislative Instrument that would replace L.I. 2462; the drafting work was ongoing through Q1 2025 and the parliamentary vote was scheduled for Q2 2025, with the repeal expected to be effected by mid-2025.

9.5 The Proposed National Galamsey Eradication Authority Legislation

The National Galamsey Eradication Authority (NGEA) Bill, tabled in the Ninth Parliament in March 2025, was the principal institutional-reform element of the galamsey-policy architecture. The Bill proposed the establishment of a dedicated statutory body that would consolidate the regulatory authority on galamsey-related matters that had been distributed across the Minerals Commission (under the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources), the Forestry Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Water Resources Commission, and the security agencies. The proposed Authority would have (i) operational-coordination authority across the enforcement and rehabilitation programmes; (ii) regulatory authority on the issuance of small-scale-mining licenses (transferring this function from the Minerals Commission); (iii) policy-advisory authority to the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources; (iv) public-engagement and education responsibilities.

The Bill's parliamentary trajectory through the first hundred days included First Reading in late March 2025, committee referral to the Mines and Energy Committee of Parliament, and stakeholder engagement through April 2025. The Bill's passage was anticipated in the second quarter of 2025 with the Authority's operationalisation expected by Q3 2025. The Bill attracted critical commentary from selected stakeholder groups, including the Minerals Commission (which would lose statutory authority under the new architecture), some elements of the National House of Chiefs (which raised concerns about traditional-authority engagement in the licensing process), and the Ghana Chamber of Mines (which represented the formal large-scale and medium-scale mining sectors and raised concerns about regulatory coherence across formal and small-scale mining).

The civil-society coalition's response to the NGEA Bill was broadly supportive while pressing for specific amendments to strengthen (i) the Authority's enforcement independence from political direction; (ii) the public-disclosure provisions on licensing decisions; (iii) the appellate procedures for affected parties; (iv) the integration with the ecological-rehabilitation programme funding.

10. The Energy-Sector Inheritance and the Dumsor-Management Project

10.1 The ECG Receivables Crisis and the IPP Stack

The energy-sector inheritance assumed on 7 January 2025 included the cumulative legacy of the post-2014 IPP stack — the multiple Independent Power Producer contracts whose contracting terms had been signed during the dumsor period under Mahama's first administration and whose payment obligations had accumulated through the post-2017 period. The cumulative ECG receivables position (the chain of payment arrears between the Electricity Company of Ghana, the Volta River Authority, the Ghana Grid Company, the Independent Power Producers, and the gas suppliers including the West African Gas Pipeline and the Ghana Gas Company) was estimated at over USD 2 billion at the change of government [TBD-VERIFY: the precise headline figure varies across sources; the cumulative receivables-and-payables position has been documented in the IMF programme reviews, the Energy Sector Levies Act (ESLA) reports, and the Public Interest and Accountability Committee reports — the headline figure is robust at the multi-billion-USD scale].

The structural drivers of the receivables crisis included (i) the design of the post-2015 IPP contracts as take-or-pay arrangements with high capacity-charge components; (ii) the persistent under-recovery of ECG's tariff revenue against the cost-of-service architecture; (iii) the persistent technical-and-commercial losses in the distribution network; (iv) the periodic under-funding of the social-tariff-support architecture; (v) the cumulative impact of cedi depreciation on USD-denominated obligations.

The first-hundred-days policy posture, articulated by Energy Minister Hon. John Jinapor, identified the receivables crisis as the principal energy-sector challenge and committed to a structured resolution programme. The programme's principal lines were (i) the audit-and-confirmation of the receivables-and-payables positions across the value chain; (ii) the renegotiation of specific IPP contracts identified as fiscally onerous; (iii) the resumption of structured payments to the IPPs and gas suppliers under a revised programmed-payment framework; (iv) the operational reform of ECG's revenue collection and technical-and-commercial-loss reduction.

10.2 The Karpowership, AKSA, CENIT, and STX Legacy Contracts

The IPP-contract review covered specifically the Karpowership floating-power-barge contracts (originally negotiated under Mahama's first administration during the dumsor period and renewed under the Akufo-Addo administration), the AKSA Energy contracts, the CENIT Energy contracts, and the STX-Korea power-purchase arrangement legacy. Each contract presented distinct policy-and-commercial questions.

Karpowership: the floating-power-barge facilities, anchored at Tema and at Sekondi, provided peaking-and-baseload capacity under contracts with capacity-charge components priced in USD. The first-hundred-days engagement included specific negotiations with Karpowership management on extension terms, fuel-supply arrangements, and the structuring of accumulated arrears.

AKSA: the Turkish-owned IPP's thermal-generation facility had been operating under a power-purchase agreement whose terms had been the subject of contemporary controversy; the first-hundred-days engagement included a contract-review process.

CENIT: the smaller-scale IPP's commercial terms were also under review.

STX-Korea: the legacy of the 2009 STX Korea-Ghana housing and power agreement — a comprehensive bilateral engagement under Mahama's first administration that had not produced the originally contemplated outputs — continued to require legal-administrative closure.

The contract-review work was conducted by a dedicated team within the Ministry of Energy and Green Transition, drawing on technical-assistance support from the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and selected legal-and-financial advisors. The first-hundred-days output was the establishment of the review framework and the initiation of specific contract negotiations rather than the conclusion of renegotiated terms.

10.3 The Gas-to-Power and LNG Trajectory

The gas-to-power-and-LNG trajectory was a separate strategic line of the energy-sector agenda. Ghana's domestic gas production from the Jubilee, TEN, and Sankofa fields had supported a marked thermal-generation capacity, but the cumulative gas-supply was projected to be insufficient to meet medium-term power-generation demand without supplementary LNG imports. The Tema LNG regasification terminal, operationalised under the Akufo-Addo administration through a Russian-counterparty engagement, had operational complexities that the first-hundred-days review addressed.

The Mahama administration's first-quarter posture committed to (i) the continuing operation of the existing gas-to-power infrastructure; (ii) the review of the Tema LNG arrangement and the determination of the appropriate medium-term LNG-supply architecture; (iii) the engagement with the Sankofa field operator (Eni) and the Jubilee/TEN field operator (Tullow Oil) on the post-2025 gas-supply trajectory; (iv) the integration of the gas-and-power agenda with the 24-Hour Economy framework's industrial-energy demand.

10.4 Renewable Energy and the Off-Grid Programme

The renewable-energy agenda — articulated as a significant component of the "Green Transition" addition to the Energy Ministry's renamed portfolio — committed to (i) the expansion of the existing solar-PV installed capacity, including the Bui Power Authority's solar projects and selected utility-scale installations; (ii) the operationalisation of the Renewable Energy Master Plan (originally published under the Akufo-Addo administration) with revised targets; (iii) the off-grid programme covering the remote rural communities not served by the national grid, with a particular emphasis on the Northern Region's "Last Mile" connections.

The Mahama administration's first-hundred-days engagement included the announcement of partnership engagements with development-finance institutions on renewable-energy programming, the resumption of the off-grid programme work, and the integration of renewable-energy questions with the broader National Determined Contribution (NDC, Paris Agreement) commitments that Ghana had submitted to the UNFCCC under the Akufo-Addo administration and that would require updating in the post-2025 period.

10.5 John Jinapor's Hundred-Day Ministerial Posture

Energy Minister Hon. John Jinapor's hundred-day posture combined a notable technical engagement with the inherited files with a careful political-communications discipline that avoided the over-promising that had affected some prior energy-ministerial communications. His public statements through January–April 2025 acknowledged the structural complexity of the energy-sector challenges, committed to specific deliverables on the receivables resolution and the IPP-contract review without committing to unrealistic time-bound outputs, and emphasised the multi-year nature of the energy-sector reform.

His parliamentary engagement included considerable committee testimony before the Mines and Energy Committee of Parliament on the inherited file, on the proposed reform architecture, and on specific contractual questions. His engagement with the international development-partner community included missions to Washington (for World Bank and IMF engagements), to London (for FCDO engagement), and to Frankfurt (for European Investment Bank engagement) in the first quarter of 2025. The cumulative posture was assessed by ACEP and IMANI commentary as appropriately measured and technically meaningful.

11. Macroeconomic Stabilisation — The First Hundred Days

11.1 The Cedi Recovery (December 2024 – April 2025)

The Ghanaian cedi's trajectory through the first hundred days of the second Mahama presidency constituted the most visible macroeconomic indicator of the transition. The cedi had stabilised through 2023 and 2024 in the GH₵14.0–GH₵15.5/USD range, with periodic volatility around political and external-shock events. The pre-inauguration period saw modest depreciation pressures associated with election-period market uncertainty and with seasonal foreign-exchange demand: from approximately GH₵14.7/USD in early December 2024 to approximately GH₵15.2/USD by early January 2025.

The post-inauguration trajectory was an appreciation. Through January 2025 the cedi recovered from approximately GH₵15.2 to approximately GH₵14.8/USD; through February 2025 it stabilised in the GH₵14.5–GH₵14.8 range; through March 2025 (the Budget month) it appreciated to approximately GH₵14.2–GH₵14.5; through April 2025 it appreciated further to approximately GH₵13.7–GH₵13.9 by mid-month [TBD-VERIFY: precise interbank reference rates day-by-day require source-confirmation against the Bank of Ghana Daily Interbank Rate series; the headline appreciation trajectory is robust across the Bank of Ghana data, Reuters wire reports, and the cumulative central-bank monetary-policy commentary, but the precise daily readings should be sourced directly from BoG]. The cumulative appreciation from the early-January peak to the mid-April trough was approximately 9–10%.

The drivers of the appreciation included (i) the IMF programme's continued credibility under the Forson stewardship; (ii) the cedi's correction from the election-period overshoot; (iii) the smoothing effect of GoldBod-channelled foreign-exchange receipts; (iv) the seasonal pattern of cocoa-export receipts (cocoa exports peak in Q1 of each year); (v) the cumulative effect of the post-Eurobond-Exchange market normalisation; (vi) the broader portfolio-investment inflows attracted by the improved macroeconomic outlook. The appreciation was politically consequential: it constituted the most-visible early evidence of the macroeconomic reset and was extensively referenced in the administration's communications.

11.2 Inflation, T-Bill Yields, and the Monetary-Policy Stance Under BoG Governor Continuity

Headline consumer-price inflation continued its post-2022 disinflation trajectory through the first hundred days. The January 2025 reading was 23.2% (down from the November 2024 reading of 23.8%); the February 2025 reading was 22.6%; the March 2025 reading was 22.4%; the April 2025 reading was 22.1% [TBD-VERIFY: precise monthly CPI readings should be sourced from the Ghana Statistical Service monthly Consumer Price Index releases; the headline disinflation trajectory of approximately 1.7 percentage points across the four-month period is robust across sources]. The cumulative decline of approximately 1.7 percentage points across the first hundred days was consistent with the disinflation pace projected in the IMF Fourth Review.

The Bank of Ghana Monetary Policy Committee, chaired by Governor Dr Ernest Addison, conducted its scheduled meetings in late January and late March 2025. The January 2025 meeting maintained the Policy Rate at 27.0% (the level set in November 2024) pending further evidence of the disinflation trajectory; the March 2025 meeting cut the Policy Rate by 100 basis points to 26.0%, the first easing since the post-2022 hiking cycle had peaked at 30.0% (the level held from March 2023 through August 2024). The May 2025 meeting (after the Hundred-Day mark but before the version-date of this document) was expected to continue the easing trajectory based on the IMF Fourth Review's macroeconomic projections.

Treasury-bill yields on the 91-day instrument declined from approximately 28.5% in December 2024 to approximately 26.0% in March 2025 to approximately 24.7% in April 2025. The 182-day and 364-day yields declined in parallel. The yield decline restored some depth to the post-DDEP primary market and supported the Government of Ghana's domestic-borrowing capacity within the IMF programme's quantitative limits. The cumulative cedi-denominated debt-servicing cost trajectory was correspondingly improved.

11.3 The Q1 2025 GDP and the Cocoa-Gold-Oil Receipts

The Q1 2025 real-GDP-growth reading, released by the Ghana Statistical Service in May 2025 (after the Hundred-Day mark), was approximately 5.3% [TBD-VERIFY: precise Q1 2025 GDP-growth figure from GSS Quarterly GDP Bulletin]. The reading continued the post-2022 growth recovery trajectory and represented growth at approximately the pace projected in the Budget. The sectoral composition reflected continuing strong performance in the services sector (financial services, ICT, trade), the recovery of the industrial sector (mining-and-quarrying, manufacturing, construction), and moderate agricultural-sector performance with continuing cocoa-sector challenges.

The cocoa, gold, and oil receipts — the principal foreign-exchange-earning commodity-export categories — had distinct Q1 2025 trajectories. Gold receipts benefited from the structurally high USD gold-price environment (with gold trading above USD 2,800/oz through Q1 2025) and from the GoldBod-channelled small-scale-mining production. Oil receipts were under pressure from softening international crude prices through Q1 2025 against rising Ghanaian production from the post-2023 well-completion programmes. Cocoa receipts continued to be challenged by the structural decline in Ghanaian cocoa production from the 2023-2024 disease-and-weather-affected harvest cycle.

The Ghana COCOBOD restructuring, an ongoing process under the IMF programme architecture, continued through the first hundred days with the Mahama administration's commitment to addressing the structural challenges in the cocoa sector — productivity decline, smuggling to Côte d'Ivoire, ageing-trees and disease management, and farmgate-pricing reform — through a comprehensive sectoral reform programme. The reform programme was at the design stage through Q1 2025 and would be elaborated through the year.

11.4 The IMF Fourth Review (April 2025) Verdict

The IMF Fourth Review's conclusion in April 2025 — discussed in §6.4 above — constituted the principal institutional-confidence-building output of the macroeconomic dimension of the first hundred days. The Fourth Review's positive verdict, the disbursement of the next tranche, and the IMF Country Report's affirmation of the Budget's fiscal stance generated a cumulative external-confidence improvement that supported the cedi-and-yields trajectories.

The Fourth Review's structural-benchmark assessment specifically addressed (i) the public-financial-management reform commitments; (ii) the Bank of Ghana reform commitments under the BoG Amendment Act (2016) and subsequent revisions; (iii) the energy-sector commitments on ECG receivables and IPP-contract review; (iv) the social-protection-floor commitments; (v) the revenue-administration commitments. The cumulative assessment was of material compliance with adjustments. The remaining quantitative-performance-criterion targets for the rest of 2025 and through to the programme's scheduled completion in May 2026 were articulated in the Country Report and were the marked framework for the post-Hundred-Day fiscal-and-monetary-policy work.

12. ECOWAS and the Sahel-States Withdrawal

12.1 The 29 January 2025 Effective Withdrawal of Mali-Burkina-Niger

The effective withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger from the Economic Community of West African States on 29 January 2025 — exactly one year after the three countries' formal announcement of their intent to withdraw — closed a multi-year regional crisis that had defined ECOWAS dynamics through 2022-2024. The withdrawal followed the establishment of the Alliance of Sahel States (Alliance des États du Sahel, AES) as the institutional alternative to ECOWAS engagement for the three Sahel governments, each of which had assumed power through military coup in the 2020-2023 period (Mali in August 2020 and May 2021; Burkina Faso in January 2022 and September 2022; Niger in July 2023).

The withdrawal had been the subject of intensive ECOWAS mediation through 2024, with the December 2024 ECOWAS Extraordinary Summit in Abuja granting an additional six-month transition window from the original 28 January 2025 date for technical-administrative arrangements on free movement, common-external-tariff transition, and other interaction-level questions. The transition window was framed by ECOWAS as a pragmatic device to avoid the immediate disruption of trade-and-people flows; it was framed by the AES governments as the formal end of the ECOWAS relationship.

For Ghana, the withdrawal had immediate practical implications. The historic Ghana-Burkina Faso trade relationship, the labour-flows between Burkina Faso and the Ghanaian agricultural and small-scale-mining sectors, and the broader regional-integration architecture were all affected. The Mahama administration's first-hundred-days posture on the Sahel withdrawal combined (i) the maintenance of bilateral relationships with each of the three AES governments; (ii) the active participation in ECOWAS's response architecture; (iii) the pragmatic management of border-and-trade questions; (iv) the continuing engagement on the regional-security agenda.

12.2 Mahama's Continuing Role as ECOWAS Mediator/Envoy

The continuing role of John Mahama as ECOWAS Special Envoy/Mediator to the Sahel States, an appointment made by the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government in June 2024 (during his post-defeat, pre-2024-election period), was retained after the December 2024 election and into his presidency. The retention was a significant ECOWAS-Authority decision: the Authority opted to maintain Mahama in the mediation role on the assessment that his pre-presidential standing as a respected regional figure, his pre-election relationships with the AES governments, and his post-inauguration platform as the elected President of Ghana would collectively strengthen rather than weaken the mediation function.

The mediation work through the first hundred days included (i) bilateral engagements with the AES governments through diplomatic channels; (ii) participation in ECOWAS Authority meetings on the post-withdrawal arrangement; (iii) public statements articulating the ECOWAS posture on the continuing relationship with the AES. The notable output of the mediation through this period was the negotiation of the technical-administrative arrangements during the six-month transition window rather than the reversal of the withdrawal decision itself, which the AES governments had treated as final.

The dual hat — President of Ghana and ECOWAS Special Envoy — generated some commentary on the procedural appropriateness of the arrangement. The post-inauguration commentary by senior ECOWAS-affairs commentators including Dr Yarik Turianskyi and selected Ghanaian foreign-policy analysts was broadly supportive on the considerable merits while noting the unconventional architectural feature.

12.3 The CFA/Eco Currency Debate Revisited

The Eco — the proposed ECOWAS-wide single currency that had been the subject of two decades of regional discussion and that had been re-articulated in 2019-2020 under a Franco-African proposal that had subsequently encountered political obstacles — was revisited in the post-AES-withdrawal ECOWAS discussions through early 2025. The post-withdrawal landscape had simplified one dimension of the currency-architecture debate (the AES-CFA-franc-zone interaction had been a meaningful complication) while complicating another (the regional-monetary-integration project would now proceed without the three Sahel countries).

The Mahama administration's posture on the Eco was articulated as continuing support for the long-horizon regional-monetary-integration project, with the practical implementation timeline subject to the convergence-criteria progress across the ECOWAS-15 (the post-AES ECOWAS membership). The first-hundred-days output was rhetorical-and-positional rather than legislative-or-operational; the operational decisions awaited future ECOWAS Authority decisions through 2025-2026.

12.4 The Regional Security Architecture After AES

The regional-security dimension of the post-AES landscape was the most operationally consequential. The trans-Sahel terrorist-organisation activity, particularly the operations of Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State Sahel Province, had expanded material through 2023-2024 with increasing pressure on the AES governments' security architectures and with documented incidents in northern Côte d'Ivoire, northern Togo, northern Benin, and increasingly northern Ghana through Q1 2025.

The Mahama administration's first-hundred-days security posture included (i) the reinforcement of the Ghanaian Armed Forces' presence in the northern regions, particularly in the Upper East and Upper West regions adjacent to the Burkina Faso border; (ii) the operational coordination with neighbouring states (Togo, Côte d'Ivoire) on cross-border security; (iii) the continuing engagement with the Accra Initiative (the regional security cooperation framework established in 2017 covering Ghana, Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Côte d'Ivoire); (iv) the strategic engagement with the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and the European Union on the broader Sahel-security architecture. The post-AES regional-security trajectory will be a continuing strategic challenge through the presidency.

13. Foreign Policy and External Relations

13.1 The Trump-2 Administration — USAID/PEPFAR Cuts and the ARV Shock

The inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States on 20 January 2025 — thirteen days after the Mahama inauguration in Accra — and the subsequent rapid administrative changes to United States foreign-assistance programming constituted the most consequential single external-shock to the first hundred days of the second Mahama presidency. The Trump administration's late-January and early-February 2025 actions included (i) the temporary freeze on US foreign-assistance disbursements; (ii) the announcement of a comprehensive review of USAID programming with marked staff-and-programme reductions; (iii) the uncertainty introduced into the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) — the foundational US HIV/AIDS funding instrument since 2003 — through programmatic and administrative changes.

For Ghana, the immediate significant impact was on the HIV antiretroviral (ARV) supply chain. Ghana's HIV response had been notable supported by PEPFAR funding for ARV procurement, distribution, and the broader treatment-and-prevention architecture. The early-2025 disruptions to PEPFAR programming raised the prospect of ARV supply gaps for the approximately 350,000 Ghanaians on antiretroviral therapy. The Ministry of Health, under Hon. Dr Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, conducted emergency planning through February-April 2025 to identify alternative ARV supply channels including the Global Fund, the Government-of-Ghana procurement, and bilateral-partner engagement.

The cumulative impact of the Trump-2 turbulence was broader than the ARV-supply question. Other US-funded programmes including selected agricultural-development, education, and democracy-and-governance programmes were also affected. The Mahama administration's diplomatic engagement with the new US Administration through Foreign Minister Ablakwa and through the Ghanaian Embassy in Washington focused on (i) maintaining continuing engagement on the core economic-cooperation agenda; (ii) protecting the AGOA eligibility (see §13.4); (iii) managing the bilateral relationship through the policy-and-personnel turbulence.

13.2 China, BRI Engagement, and the Bilateral-Debt Relationship Post-Restructuring

The China bilateral relationship — considerable shaped by China's role as co-chair (with France) of the Official Creditor Committee that had concluded the June 2024 G20 Common Framework bilateral-debt restructuring with Ghana — entered a post-restructuring phase under the Mahama administration. The Chinese ambassador to Ghana attended the inauguration; senior PRC engagement with the new administration commenced through January 2025 with the Foreign Minister's visit framework and with sector-specific engagement on infrastructure-and-mining programmes.

The Belt and Road Initiative engagement was retained as a meaningful framework for the bilateral relationship. Specific BRI-related projects — including the Boankra Inland Port, selected road-and-rail infrastructure projects, and the cumulative Sinohydro-related infrastructure portfolio — continued under their respective implementation arrangements. The Mahama administration's posture combined (i) the affirmation of the bilateral economic engagement; (ii) the protection of Chinese-financed infrastructure projects' fiscal viability under the post-restructuring debt-servicing framework; (iii) the careful management of the ORAL implications for selected China-related contracts (some of which had been identified in the public-submissions process for ORAL examination).

The bauxite-and-aluminium engagement, conducted under the Sinohydro Master Project Support Agreement and the broader Ghana Integrated Aluminium Development Corporation framework, continued under review through Q1 2025 with the integration of these questions into the broader 24-Hour Economy framework's industrial-development agenda.

13.3 The European Union, Germany, and IMF Coordination

The European Union engagement with the second Mahama presidency was structured through the EU's ongoing development-cooperation programme (the National Indicative Programme covering the 2021-2027 multi-annual financial framework), the EU's role in IMF-programme coordination, and specific bilateral engagements with major EU member states — most prominently Germany (through GIZ and KfW engagement), France (through the AFD and the residual post-Sahel-withdrawal regional engagement), the United Kingdom (which while no longer an EU member retained material bilateral engagement through FCDO), and the Netherlands and the Scandinavian member states through their development programming.

The EU's role as a Paris Club creditor and as a supporter of the IMF programme architecture made the EU engagement marked coordinated with the IMF-and-World-Bank dimension. The cumulative European engagement provided a stable institutional anchor that contrasted with the volatility of the US engagement under the Trump-2 transition. Specific German engagement on the galamsey-rehabilitation programme (through GIZ) and on the energy-sector reform (through KfW) was significant material through the first hundred days.

13.4 AGOA, AfCFTA, and the External Sector

The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) eligibility — under which Ghana benefited from preferential market access for selected exports to the United States — was scheduled for renewal under the 2025 AGOA review cycle. The Trump-2 administration's broader posture on AGOA was uncertain through Q1 2025 with the legislative renewal process subject to Congressional action. The Mahama administration's engagement through the Ghanaian Embassy in Washington and through the Foreign Minister's January-March 2025 engagements emphasised Ghana's continuing eligibility on the notable criteria (democratic governance, market-economy reform, anti-corruption performance) and its track record under the AGOA framework.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), whose headquarters is in Accra, retained its institutional centrality to Ghana's continental-trade engagement. The Mahama administration's posture on AfCFTA combined the maintenance of the AfCFTA headquarters in Accra (with the associated diplomatic-and-economic engagement) with the considerable implementation of the AfCFTA trading-protocol commitments in Ghana's bilateral and multilateral trade relationships. The integration of the 24-Hour Economy framework with the AfCFTA market-access opportunity was a specific dimension of the cross-Ministerial coordination through Q1 2025.

The external-sector trajectory through the first hundred days — captured in the trade-balance, current-account-balance, and foreign-direct-investment-inflow data — was broadly stable, with the cumulative external-account improvement supporting the cedi-and-reserves trajectory. The Mahama administration's communications emphasised the trade-and-investment-promotion dimension of the foreign-policy posture as a meaningful priority for the year.

14. Constitutional and Institutional Reform

14.1 The Constitution Review Commission Revival

The Constitution Review Commission (CRC) had been established in 2010 under the first Mahama-era administration (the Mills-Mahama presidency, see GH-D-01) under the chairmanship of Prof Albert Fiadjoe and had produced a 2011 report recommending material constitutional amendments. The CRC's report had not been marked implemented through the subsequent Akufo-Addo administration despite the political-rhetorical commitment to constitutional reform. The Mahama administration's January 2025 commitment to "reviving" the CRC was thus a significant return to a long-pending institutional-reform agenda.

The Vice-President Prof Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang was assigned the coordination of the CRC revival as part of her presidential-delegated portfolios. The first-hundred-days output was the formal announcement of the CRC revival, the appointment of a successor CRC chair (with the original chair Prof Fiadjoe having retired from active service), the establishment of a Secretariat to support the revived CRC's work, and the framing of the CRC's specific mandate for the post-2025 period.

The post-2025 CRC mandate emphasised (i) the review of the 2011 CRC report's recommendations and the prioritisation of those that retained relevance under post-2025 conditions; (ii) specific attention to the Article 71 holders' remuneration framework, the Chapter 8 provisions on decentralisation, and selected other provisions; (iii) the design of the public-consultation framework for the 2026 mid-term constitutional referendum; (iv) the integration with the broader Reset-agenda institutional-reform programme.

14.2 The Proposed 2026 Mid-Term Referendum on Chapter 8

The 2026 mid-term referendum, proposed by the President in the inaugural address and reaffirmed in the SONA, was articulated as a specific constitutional-amendment vehicle for the principal Chapter 8 (decentralisation) reforms. Chapter 8 of the 1992 Constitution provides the constitutional architecture for local government, including the District Assemblies system, the regional administrative architecture, and the question of partisan local-government elections (which under the current constitutional framework are conducted on a non-partisan basis but have been the subject of long-standing reform discussions).

The proposed referendum's specific question architecture was at the consultation-and-drafting stage through Q1 2025. The provisional structure included (i) a question on partisan local-government elections; (ii) a question on the Article 71-holder remuneration framework (see §14.3 below); (iii) potentially additional questions on selected other Chapter 8 provisions. The procedural-design work — including the question of how multiple-question referenda would be structured under the Referendum Act — was at the legal-drafting stage.

The political-economy of the proposed referendum was complex. Partisan local-government elections had been the subject of cross-party rhetorical support across multiple administrations but had not previously been implemented because of (i) the perceived risk of intensifying partisan competition at the local level; (ii) the chieftaincy-system's notable non-partisan role; (iii) the implementation complexity. The Mahama administration's commitment to the referendum represented a considerable willingness to test the constitutional reform through popular vote.

14.3 Article 71 Holder Remuneration Reform

The Article 71 of the 1992 Constitution provides the architecture for the determination of salaries, allowances, gratuities, and pensions for the President, the Vice-President, the Chief Justice, Members of Parliament, Ministers and Deputy Ministers, judges of the superior courts of judicature, the Chairmen and members of the Council of State, the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, the National Commission for Civic Education, the Public Services Commission, and the Auditor-General, and other specified office-holders. The constitutional architecture has been the subject of long-standing political controversy, with periodic concerns over the cumulative cost of Article 71 emoluments (particularly the post-service gratuities for Members of Parliament at the end of each parliamentary term, sometimes characterised as "ex gratia" payments) and over the perceived insulation of the determination process from broader public scrutiny.

The proposed Article 71 reform, articulated in the referendum proposal, includes (i) the modification of the determination architecture to introduce broader public scrutiny; (ii) the potential restructuring of the end-of-term gratuity provisions; (iii) the alignment of the Article 71 framework with broader public-sector remuneration policy. The specific reform design was at the consultative stage through the first hundred days; the meaningful reform proposals would be elaborated through Q2-Q3 2025 with parliamentary engagement before the referendum.

14.4 Decentralisation, the District Assemblies Question, and Local-Government Reform

The broader local-government reform agenda, beyond the partisan-elections question, included (i) the financial-decentralisation framework under which Districts receive resources from the Common Fund and other transfers; (ii) the operational-effectiveness of the District Assemblies as service-delivery institutions; (iii) the integration of the chieftaincy system with the formal local-government architecture; (iv) the urban-and-rural balance in the local-government allocations.

The Ministry of Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs under Hon. Ahmed Ibrahim conducted the first-quarter consultative work on the local-government-reform agenda, with the engagement of the National House of Chiefs, the Association of Local Government Authorities of Ghana (ALGA), and the broader civil-society and academic communities. The material reform proposals would be elaborated through Q2-Q4 2025 in coordination with the CRC's work.

15. The Three-Account Reading

15.1 The Mahama / NDC Reset / Institutional-Cleanup Logic

The Mahama administration's own framing of the first hundred days, articulated through the 16 April 2025 Hundred-Day Address and through the cumulative communications architecture of the period, characterised the period as the executive-legislative implementation of a clear electoral mandate. The framing's principal claims were:

(i) The 16.6-percentage-point electoral margin and the 184-seat parliamentary majority constituted an unambiguous mandate for the Reset agenda; (ii) the seven Hundred-Day deliverables identified in the SONA had been marked delivered (the Budget passed; the nuisance taxes abolished; the 24-Hour Economy Secretariat operational; GoldBod established; the ORAL Preliminary Report published; Operation Halt II reactivated; the IMF Fourth Review concluded positively); (iii) the macroeconomic stabilisation indicators — cedi appreciation, inflation decline, T-bill-yield decline, IMF programme on track — provided significant evidence of the Reset's early effectiveness; (iv) the institutional-cleanup work — the cabinet rationalisation to 56 positions, the ORAL pipeline, the procurement-suspension and review, the legislative reform agenda — demonstrated commitment to the manifesto's broader good-governance commitments.

The framing's analytical core was that the second Mahama presidency represented a notable break with the post-2017 institutional trajectory rather than a continuation under different management. The break was articulated in the policy-architecture (the Reset agenda's distinct doctrinal framing), in the personnel architecture (the cabinet's specific composition), in the institutional architecture (ORAL, GoldBod, the 24-Hour Economy Secretariat, the proposed NGEA, the CRC revival), and in the communications architecture (the Hundred-Day frame, the explicit deliverables commitments, the measured opposition-engagement posture).

15.2 The NPP-Opposition Critique — Broken Promises and Vindictive Prosecution

The NPP-opposition account, articulated through Minority Leader Afenyo-Markin, through former Vice-President Bawumia's post-defeat commentary, through the NPP's parliamentary work in the Ninth Parliament, and through aligned media commentary, characterised the first hundred days through three principal lines of critique:

First, the continuity-of-claim and credit-attribution critique: the post-Hundred-Day macroeconomic indicators reflected the cumulative effect of the predecessor administration's IMF programme work, the 2023 DDEP, the June 2024 G20 Common Framework bilateral-restructuring, and the November 2024 Eurobond Exchange. The cedi appreciation in particular was considerable a continuation of the post-November-2024 normalisation rather than a Mahama-administration achievement.

Second, the broken-promises and fiscal-irresponsibility critique: specific manifesto commitments had not been meaningful delivered in the first hundred days. The 24-Hour Economy framework remained at the policy-architecture stage rather than the operational-implementation stage; the Goldcoast Bank had not been established; the Women's Development Bank legislation was pending; the NGEA Bill was in committee; the L.I. 2462 repeal was deferred; the CRC revival was at the appointments stage rather than the material-work stage. The nuisance-tax abolition, while implemented, was characterised as fiscally irresponsible and as likely to require offsetting tax measures within the year.

Third, the vindictive-prosecution critique: ORAL was characterised as a political-prosecution instrument operating outside the constitutional anti-corruption architecture, with the chair's (Ofori) lack of prosecutorial-and-legal training, the public-submissions mechanism's due-process implications, and the priority-case selection's political-targeting character cumulatively constituting a procedural-and-marked concern.

The NPP-opposition account's analytical core was that the first hundred days represented a moderate institutional-continuity-with-rhetorical-overlay rather than a significant break, and that the post-2025 NDC governance trajectory would face increasing structural-constraints that would erode the early macroeconomic-and-political momentum.

15.3 The Structural Reading — Debt-Restructured Rentier-Democracy

The structural account, articulated by CDD-Ghana (Kojo Asante, H. Kwasi Prempeh, Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi), IMANI (Franklin Cudjoe, Bright Simons), ACEP (Stephen Yeboah), academic commentary (Joseph Kraus, Carlos Lopes, Lindsay Whitfield), and the broader internationally engaged commentariat, characterised the first hundred days through the structural-conditions frame rather than the partisan-and-personal frame of either of the first two accounts.

The structural reading's core claims:

(i) The post-2022 Ghanaian state operates as a debt-restructured-rentier-democracy whose macroeconomic stabilisation is conditional on continuing IMF-programme discipline, continuing bilateral-debt-servicing under the G20 Common Framework, and continuing Eurobond-coupon servicing under the November 2024 exchange. The first-hundred-days improvements reflect the post-crisis structural-stabilisation pattern characteristic of restructured sovereigns and are not exclusively attributable to any partisan-political performance.

(ii) The 24-Hour Economy framework's operational deliverability is conditional on structural-conditions (electricity supply, foreign-exchange stability, export-market access, labour-supply flexibility) that are not within any single administration's direct control. The framework's macroeconomic upside is notable but contingent.

(iii) The ORAL recovery agenda's operational deliverability is conditional on the Ghanaian judicial and prosecutorial system's capacity to manage complex forensic-and-financial cases under intense political scrutiny. The cumulative recovery output is likely to be smaller than the headline aggregate-claim figures and the longer-than-anticipated time-horizon of the cases will test the administration's political-discipline on the agenda.

(iv) The structural fiscal-constraints — IMF primary-surplus targets, bilateral-and-commercial-debt servicing, the energy-sector receivables, the cumulative legacy of the post-2010 fiscal trajectory — will continue to constrain expenditure-flexibility regardless of partisan rotation. The post-Hundred-Day governance trajectory will be considerable shaped by these constraints.

(v) The institutional-reform agenda (CRC revival, NGEA legislation, GoldBod operationalisation, 24-Hour Economy framework implementation) requires legislative-administrative capacity that is finite. The cumulative legislative-and-administrative workload of the year will test the public-sector capacity at multiple levels.

The structural reading's analytical contribution is to displace the partisan-attribution question with the conditions-of-governance question. Its policy implication is that the first hundred days should be assessed against the structural-feasibility of the agenda rather than against the partisan-mandate-implementation criteria of the first two accounts.

16. Conclusion — The First Hundred Days and the Question of the Reset's Durability

The first hundred days of John Dramani Mahama's second presidency, from his 7 January 2025 inauguration to his 16 April 2025 Hundred-Day Address, constituted the most meaningful activated post-inauguration period of any Fourth-Republic Ghanaian presidency. The combination of (i) the electoral-mandate scale (56.55% presidential vote, 184-seat parliamentary majority); (ii) the policy-architecture compactness (the Five Pillars of the Reset, the seven Hundred-Day deliverables); (iii) the institutional-design ambition (ORAL, the 24-Hour Economy Secretariat, GoldBod, the proposed NGEA, the CRC revival); and (iv) the macroeconomic-tailwind alignment (cedi appreciation, inflation decline, T-bill yield decline, IMF Fourth Review positive verdict) produced a first-hundred-days assessment record material more favourable than the contemporary baseline for African post-inauguration assessments.

The marked deliverables — the cabinet appointments and parliamentary vetting; the 11 March 2025 Budget with the nuisance-tax abolition; the 24-Hour Economy Secretariat establishment; the Ghana Gold Board establishment; the ORAL Preliminary Report and the prosecution-pipeline architecture; the reactivation of Operation Halt II under the unified Inter-Ministerial Task Force; the IMF Fourth Review's positive conclusion — represented a tangible policy-and-administrative output that exceeded the typical Fourth-Republic first-hundred-days baseline. The Hundred-Day frame, deliberately constructed by the administration as a measurable accountability instrument, generated a communications-discipline architecture that contrasted with the broader-frame approaches of some prior administrations.

The significant constraints — the structural fiscal limits under the IMF programme, the operational complexity of the 24-Hour Economy framework's implementation, the legal-procedural complexity of the ORAL prosecution pipeline, the political-economy resistance to specific institutional reforms (the L.I. 2462 repeal, the Article 71 reform, the partisan-local-government question), the external-shock turbulence from the Trump-2 administration's policy changes — represented the durable conditions under which the Reset agenda will be tested through the rest of the presidency.

The durability question — whether the first-hundred-days output represents a sustainable institutional reform trajectory or a politically-mobilising opening phase whose notable delivery will be more constrained — is the central analytical question for the post-Hundred-Day period. The three competing accounts of the period (the Mahama/NDC institutional-cleanup account, the NPP-opposition broken-promises account, the structural debt-restructured-rentier-democracy account) provide the analytical frame within which the post-Hundred-Day assessments will be conducted. The mid-2025, first-anniversary, and second-anniversary assessments will sequentially populate the post-Hundred-Day record.

The Ghanaian Fourth Republic's broader trajectory has been considerable shaped by the second-term decisions of its successive presidents. The Rawlings second term (1997-2001) consolidated the civilian-democratic transition; the Kufuor second term (2005-2009) delivered the HIPC completion and the institutional-economic stabilisation; the Akufo-Addo second term (2021-2025) was overshadowed by the 2022 debt crisis. Mahama's second presidency, beginning a decade after the conclusion of his first term, is the only Fourth-Republic second-presidency-of-an-individual that follows a non-consecutive electoral comeback rather than a re-election. The structural conditions, the personal political trajectory, and the institutional-reform ambition cumulatively position the presidency as a meaningful test of the broader Fourth-Republic capacity for democratic-and-economic recovery.

The post-Hundred-Day trajectory through 2025 and into 2026 will be shaped by (i) the completion of the IMF programme in May 2026 and the post-programme economic architecture; (ii) the implementation of the 24-Hour Economy framework at the sectoral-and-firm level; (iii) the prosecutorial outputs of the ORAL pipeline; (iv) the legislative passage of the NGEA Bill, the Women's Development Bank legislation, and the CRC revival's outputs; (v) the conduct and outcome of the proposed 2026 mid-term constitutional referendum; (vi) the cumulative response to the Trump-2-era external-shock environment; (vii) the early-2026 ECOWAS dynamics; (viii) the longer-horizon question of the NDC's mid-term political-economic positioning toward 2028. Each of these dimensions will be the subject of subsequent documents in the post-Hundred-Day governance-corpus expansion.

The first hundred days closed with the administration material intact, the macroeconomic indicators broadly favourable, the institutional-reform architecture in operation, and the political-coalitional positioning consolidated. The post-Hundred-Day period will test whether the early momentum can be sustained against the structural conditions and the political-and-economic external-shock environment of the post-2025 world.

---

Sources

1. President John Dramani Mahama, Inaugural Address, Independence Square, Accra, 7 January 2025.
2. President John Dramani Mahama, State of the Nation Address (SONA) 2025, Parliament of Ghana, 27 February 2025.
3. President John Dramani Mahama, First Hundred Days Address to the Nation, 16 April 2025.
4. National Democratic Congress, 2024 Manifesto: Resetting Ghana for Jobs, Prosperity and the Rule of Law (Accra: NDC, September 2024).
5. Office of the President of Ghana, Notices of Ministerial Nominations and Appointments, 9 January – 24 January 2025 (gazetted serially).
6. Office of the President of Ghana, Establishment Notice: Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL) Committee, 23 December 2024; ORAL Preliminary Report, 10 February 2025.
7. Office of the President of Ghana, Executive Instrument: Establishment of the 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development Secretariat, January 2025; Hon. Augustus Goosie Tanoh, Sectoral Roll-Out Briefing, March 2025.
8. Ministry of Finance, Republic of Ghana, 2025 Budget Statement and Economic Policy of the Government of Ghana (the "Resetting Budget"), delivered by Hon. Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, Parliament of Ghana, 11 March 2025.
9. Ministry of Finance, Republic of Ghana, 2025 Appropriations Act and the Revenue Administration (Amendment) Act 2025 (repealing the E-Levy, Betting Tax, Emissions Tax, and adjusting the COVID-19 Health Recovery Levy).
10. International Monetary Fund, Ghana — Fourth Review Under the Extended Credit Facility Arrangement and Request for Modification of Performance Criteria, IMF Country Report No. 25/45 (or successor), April 2025.
11. International Monetary Fund, Ghana — Third Review Under the Extended Credit Facility Arrangement, IMF Country Report (December 2024), as the inheritance baseline.
12. Bank of Ghana, Monetary Policy Committee Press Releases, January, March, and May 2025 (MPC meetings of late-January, late-March, and late-May 2025); Summary of Economic and Financial Data, monthly, January–May 2025.
13. Ghana Statistical Service, Consumer Price Index Newsletter, January–April 2025 (monthly releases); Quarterly GDP Bulletin, Q4 2024 and Q1 2025.
14. Parliament of Ghana, Hansard (Official Report), Eighth and Ninth Parliaments transition period, 7 January 2025 – April 2025; Vetting of Ministerial Nominees, Appointments Committee, January–March 2025.
15. Electoral Commission of Ghana, Declaration of Results — 2024 Presidential Election, 9 December 2024; Parliamentary Elections Results — 2024, 14 December 2024.
16. Centre for Democratic Development — Ghana (CDD-Ghana), First-Hundred-Days Assessment of the Mahama Administration, April 2025; Kojo Asante and H. Kwasi Prempeh, commentary in Democracy Watch (Q1 2025).
17. IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, IMANI Africa Hundred-Days Assessment, April 2025; Franklin Cudjoe and Bright Simons, IMANI Fiscal Briefings, January–April 2025.
18. Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), Briefing on the Energy-Sector Inheritance and the GoldBod Reform, March 2025; Stephen Yeboah, public commentary, January–April 2025.
19. Daily Graphic (Accra), archive coverage of transition, cabinet formation, ORAL, 24-Hour Economy, galamsey enforcement, and the March 2025 Budget, December 2024 – April 2025.
20. Joy News / MyJoyOnline, Citi Newsroom / Citi FM, Asaase Radio, GhanaWeb, Business and Financial Times (Ghana), archive coverage of the period.
21. Africa Confidential, Vol. 66 (2025) coverage of Ghana; Africa Report (Jeune Afrique) coverage; Reuters Accra wire coverage; Bloomberg Africa coverage; Financial Times Africa pages.
22. Coalition Against Illegal Mining (Ghana), Position Papers, January–April 2025; National Galamsey Eradication Authority (proposed Bill, March 2025); Forestry Commission and Environmental Protection Agency operational briefings.
23. ECOWAS Commission, Communiqués of the Extraordinary Authority of Heads of State (15 December 2024; 29 January 2025 — Sahel States withdrawal effective date); Mahama's role as ECOWAS Special Envoy/Mediator (appointment retained from June 2024).
24. Office of the Special Prosecutor, public statements January–April 2025; Attorney-General's Department, Hon. Dominic Ayine, briefings and case notices.

Related Documents

• GH-E-01: The 7 December 2024 Election and the Mahama Return (2024–2025) — proximate predecessor document; the election that produced this presidency.
• GH-D-01: The Mills and Mahama NDC Presidencies (2009–2017) — Mahama's first-term record against which the second-term agenda is positioned.
• GH-D-02: The 2022 Domestic Debt Exchange and the IMF Programme — the macroeconomic inheritance the second Mahama presidency assumed.
• GH-D-03: Nana Akufo-Addo Presidency (2017–2024) — the predecessor administration whose record ORAL is auditing.
• GH-D-04: 2022 Domestic Debt Exchange and IMF Programme — sister micro-treatment.
• GH-E-03: Post-IMF Recovery and the External Debt Restructuring — sibling sequel covering the broader recovery arc.
• GH-H-PRES-05: John Dramani Mahama — biographical parent.
• GH-H-PRES-06: Nana Akufo-Addo — biographical predecessor.
• GH-I-01: Ghana Electoral Commission — institutional reference.
• GH-O-02: Galamsey (Illegal Mining) Crisis — domain reference for the Operation Galamstop sections.
• GH-G-02: Free Senior High School Policy — policy continuity reference.
• GH-F-01: Ghana in ECOWAS — Mediation Role — foreign-policy domain reference.
• GH-R-01: Ghana Governance Books Canon.
• GH-E-04: Mahama Year 1 mid-term fiscal Reset agenda
• GH-A-02: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
• GH-H-PRES-03: John Agyekum Kufuor — A Biography
• GH-A-03: The 24 February 1966 Coup, the National Liberation Council, and the Brief Return to Civilian Rule
• GH-B-03: The Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) Rule — Rawlings's Eleven-Year Revolution and the Path to the Fourth Republic
• GH-C-02: The Acheampong–Akuffo–Limann Era — NRC, SMC, AFRC, and the Third Republic
• GH-D-05: Akufo-Addo Year One — The 7 January 2017 Inauguration, the Free SHS Launch, the Bauxite-for-Sinohydro Decision, Planting for Food and Jobs, and the Office of the Special Prosecutor
• GH-F-02: Ghana–China Bauxite-for-Infrastructure and the Belt and Road Initiative
• GH-D-06: Mahama Year Two (January 2026 – January 2027) — Fiscal Recovery, 24-Hour Economy Implementation, and the 2028 Mid-Term Test
• GH-D-07: Akufo-Addo Second Term 2021–2024 — Cedi Crisis, DDEP, and the Path to 2024 Defeat
• GH-J-02: The Galamsey Illegal Mining Crisis — Three Accounts
• GH-I-02: The Ghanaian Judiciary — The Supreme Court, Election Petitions, and the Politics of Judicial Independence
• GH-O-01: Ghana Megatrends — The 2030s Questions