On 7 January 2025, at the precise moment John Dramani Mahama took the oath of office as Ghana's ninth president, something remarkable happened across the country that received almost no public discussion. By operation of law, every board member of every state-owned enterprise in Ghana simultaneously ceased to hold office.

The Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority, the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, the Volta River Authority, the Ghana Revenue Authority, the National Health Insurance Authority, the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Communications Authority, the governing boards of each of these institutions, and dozens more, became vacant at the stroke of midnight on inauguration day. Section 14 of the Presidential Transitions Act makes this automatic. It requires no presidential action, no consultation, and no cause. The mere transfer of power empties the decision-making structures of the entire state apparatus simultaneously.

This is not an aberration. It is how Ghana has governed itself since the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1993. What follows the inauguration is a months-long cycle of appointments that consumes an extraordinary proportion of a new government's political energy and the state's administrative bandwidth.

In January 2025 alone, President Mahama announced 42 ministerial nominees, 16 regional ministers, 20 senior appointments to the Office of the President, a new 12-member governing board for the Bank of Ghana, new service chiefs for all branches of the armed forces, a new Inspector General of Police, and began the process of nominating District Chief Executives for Ghana's 261 districts. By April 2025, a further batch of DCE nominations was still being processed. The full cycle -- from inauguration to functional reconstitution of the state's leadership across all institutions -- takes the better part of a year. That year is not spent governing. It is spent appointing.

The question Ghana has not seriously confronted is whether this system is compatible with the developmental aspirations of a country that has been independent for nearly seven decades. The evidence suggests it is not.

The Anatomy of a Transition

To understand the scale of what changes when a Ghanaian government changes, it is necessary to trace the full architecture of presidential appointment power. The 1992 Constitution, read alongside the enabling legislation that has accumulated over three decades, gives the president of Ghana appointment authority over a range of offices that would astonish most citizens if listed comprehensively in a single document.

At the apex sits the cabinet: at least ten and not more than nineteen ministers constitutionally, though the practice of deputy ministers, ministers of state, and presidential advisers inflates the functional total considerably. Below the cabinet are 16 regional ministers, one per region. Below them are District Chief Executives for each of the country's 261 districts, nominated by the president and subject to approval by district assembly members, but nominated nonetheless. Each DCE is the de facto executive of a district administration responsible for local service delivery, infrastructure maintenance, and development planning. Each departs when their political principal departs.

Beyond the political appointees proper, the president appoints by constitutional authority under Article 70, in consultation with the Council of State, the chairmen and members of the governing bodies of all public corporations. Ghana had approximately 49 major state-owned enterprises and joint venture companies under the central government as of 2016, alongside a substantial number of statutory public entities, regulatory bodies, and other state institutions. Each of these has a governing board. Each board is constituted by presidential appointment. Each ceases to function automatically upon presidential transition.

The Bank of Ghana, whose monetary policy independence is a foundation of macroeconomic credibility, has its governor, deputy governors, and entire governing board appointed by the president. In February 2025, President Mahama appointed a new governor, new deputy governors, and a new 12-member board. Their predecessors, appointed by the Akufo-Addo administration, had ceased to hold office. The institution responsible for managing Ghana's currency, supervising its banking system, and maintaining price stability was reconstituted wholesale within weeks of a general election.

The heads of regulatory institutions -- the entities responsible for overseeing electricity tariffs, telecommunications licensing, securities markets, insurance, food safety, environmental standards, and public procurement -- are presidential appointees whose continuity is not guaranteed across administrations. The leadership of anti-corruption bodies, including the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice and the Economic and Organised Crime Office, operates under the same political weather system. Ambassadors and high commissioners are recalled and replaced. The leadership of Ghana's intelligence services changes. The entire senior layer of the state -- the people who set strategic direction, manage institutional relationships, sign off on major decisions, and represent Ghana to foreign governments and international organisations -- turns over simultaneously, repeatedly, and by design.

What This Costs and What It Cannot Buy

The direct financial costs of Ghana's transition cycle are real but rarely quantified in public. Early retirement gratuities must be paid to board members and institutional heads who leave before the natural expiry of any term their enabling legislation may have specified. Recruitment and orientation costs for replacement appointments are absorbed by institutions already under fiscal pressure. Ongoing procurement processes, regulatory investigations, and development projects are interrupted when leadership changes, often requiring restart or renegotiation. Foreign partnerships and bilateral relationships that depend on personal trust between institutional counterparts must be rebuilt from a lower base.

The indirect costs are structurally more damaging. Research examining the boards of Ghana's state-owned enterprises has consistently found that appointment criteria reflect political affiliation rather than technical competence. As far back as 2010, survey research across state enterprises in Ghana found that appointment of SOE board members was not based on technical competencies but rather political affiliation. The consequences were predictable: in 2016, when the State Interests and Governance Authority first attempted to compile a systematic State Ownership Report, it found that only two of Ghana's major state enterprises had current audited financial statements available. Two. The governance structures of institutions managing Ghana's ports, its oil sector, its electricity generation, its water systems, and its major commercial activities were so poorly constituted that basic financial accountability had broken down across almost the entire portfolio.

This is not an argument about individual incompetence. Many of Ghana's political appointees are talented, educated, and genuinely motivated by public service. The argument is structural: institutions that reconstitute their leadership every four to eight years cannot accumulate the institutional memory, the inter-agency relationships, or the long-horizon strategic capacity that complex governance functions require.

An electricity regulator whose board changes with governments cannot credibly commit to the multi-year tariff trajectories that investors in generation capacity need to see before committing capital. A port authority whose governing structure is vacant on inauguration day and reconstituted months later cannot maintain the operational continuity that makes Ghana competitive with neighbouring ports. A central bank whose entire board is replaced within weeks of an election cannot fully insulate its monetary policy decisions from the political context in which it was reconstituted, regardless of the intentions of its new members.

The Technology Argument Nobody Is Making

There is a deeper problem beneath the appointment cycle that Ghana's public debate has not adequately addressed: the state's fundamental dependence on human beings as the primary delivery mechanism for public services. In a system where everything depends on who holds which appointment, technology is necessarily secondary. Processes that should be automated remain manual because the human in the relevant role has discretion over how they are conducted. Services that should be accessible online require physical presence because the human in the relevant office has not been replaced, or has been replaced by someone with different priorities, or has not yet been replaced at all.

Countries that have successfully built effective public services in the twenty-first century have done so by systematically removing human discretion from routine service delivery and investing it in systems. Estonia, a country of 1.3 million people, processes 99 per cent of its public services digitally, with citizens able to register businesses, file taxes, access health records, vote in elections, and interact with virtually every organ of the state through a single digital identity infrastructure. The consequence is that government services in Estonia are substantively unaffected by changes in political leadership because the systems through which those services are delivered are not dependent on any individual's continued presence in any particular role. When an Estonian government changes, the tax authority continues to function because the tax authority is, in its operational core, a technology system rather than a collection of politically appointed managers.

Ghana has made genuine investments in digital public services- the GhanaCard biometric identity system, the Ghana.gov citizen services portal, e-procurement platforms, and various agency-specific digitisation efforts- but these investments sit within an institutional architecture that remains fundamentally human-dependent at its apex. The Ghana Revenue Authority, whose efficiency is critical to domestic resource mobilisation, operates digital filing and payment systems that have demonstrably improved compliance. Yet its strategic leadership changes with administrations, creating recurring uncertainty about enforcement priorities, audit strategies, and institutional culture that no amount of frontend digitisation can fully compensate for.

The point is not that technology eliminates the need for capable leadership. It is that a state whose service delivery infrastructure is built on robust, well-designed systems rather than on the discretion of individually appointed human beings is far more resilient to the political turbulence that Ghana's transition cycle produces. Singapore's consistently high-performing civil service, rated first globally by the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford in 2024, combines merit-based human appointment with systematic process design that ensures services continue to function regardless of who occupies any particular role. The system works. The people serve the system rather than constituting it.

Ghana's current architecture inverts this relationship. The people are the system. When the people change, the system effectively restarts.

The Legitimate Case for Political Accountability

An honest treatment of this question requires engaging seriously with the argument on the other side, because that argument has genuine merit in a democratic context.

Elected governments derive their authority from popular mandates. When Ghanaians vote for a president and a parliamentary majority, they are endorsing a set of policy commitments that the incoming administration has an obligation to implement. Implementing those commitments requires placing people who are aligned with the government's priorities in positions that shape policy direction. A government that wins an election on a platform of economic transformation cannot deliver that transformation if the entire apparatus of the state -- its development authorities, its regulatory bodies, its strategic enterprises -- is populated exclusively by individuals appointed by and loyal to the previous administration. The democratic argument for political appointments at the apex of government is not simply about patronage. It is about the practical capacity of elected governments to govern.

This argument is sound, and it applies legitimately to a specific category of appointments: ministers who advocate publicly for government policy and are directly accountable through parliament, senior advisers who translate political mandates into operational direction, and politically sensitive roles whose occupants must visibly represent the government of the day. These appointments should change with the government. That is not a problem to be solved but a feature of democratic accountability to be protected.

The argument does not extend, with equal force, to the Governor of the Bank of Ghana, the Commissioner of the Ghana Revenue Authority, the Director General of the National Communications Authority, or the members of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission. These are not policy advocates. They are technical administrators of complex systems whose effectiveness depends fundamentally on expertise, continuity, and independence from the political cycle. Reconstituting their leadership wholesale every four to eight years does not enhance democratic accountability. It undermines institutional effectiveness in ways that ultimately harm the very citizens in whose name the democratic mandate is claimed.

The distinction between roles that should rotate with governments and roles that should not is not difficult to draw in principle. It is only difficult to implement because both categories of appointment currently serve the same function in Ghana's political economy: rewarding the people who delivered electoral victory.

What Reform Would Actually Require

Ghana does not need to start from scratch. The Public Services Commission, constitutionally mandated since 1947 and rooted in the Haragin Committee's colonial-era recognition that impartial public administration requires insulation from political control, already exists as the institutional framework for merit-based appointment. What it has lacked across Ghana's democratic history is the statutory authority and political backing to perform its constitutional function substantively rather than procedurally.

Reform would require, at a minimum, three specific changes. First, a constitutional amendment establishing fixed, staggered, non-renewable terms for the heads of regulatory bodies, state-owned enterprises, anti-corruption institutions, and the central bank, with removal only for cause through a parliamentary procedure equivalent to that used for superior court judges. Staggered terms -- meaning not all terms expire simultaneously -- would ensure continuity across transitions. Second, a genuinely independent appointment process for these roles: public advertisement of vacancies, transparent merit criteria published in advance, shortlisting by a commission whose members are themselves insulated from executive pressure, and published rationales for final selections. Third, a systematic programme of process automation and digital service delivery that progressively reduces the dependence of service quality on individual human appointment, building institutional systems robust enough to outlast any political cycle.

None of this eliminates political appointments where they are legitimate. Ministers, regional ministers, and the political leadership of the presidency appropriately change with governments. What changes is the assumption that everything else should change with them -- that the Bank of Ghana board, the governing structures of the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority, the leadership of the electricity regulator, and the head of the revenue authority are all, in effect, prizes to be distributed by the winner of each presidential election.

Ghana has been running this system for thirty-two years. The results are visible: state enterprises that oscillate between political direction and operational paralysis, regulatory institutions that cannot sustain multi-year enforcement strategies, a central bank whose independence is constitutionally proclaimed and practically qualified, and a public service that spends approximately twelve months of every four-year term in various stages of reconstitution. The country has not lacked talent, ambition, or democratic commitment. What it has lacked is the institutional architecture to convert those qualities into consistent, compounding developmental outcomes.

The appointment system is not incidental to that problem. It is the mechanism through which the problem reproduces itself, every four years, without interruption, in plain sight.

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About the author:

Dominic Senayah is an International Relations professional and policy analyst based in England, specialising in African political economy, humanitarian governance, and migration diplomacy. He holds an MA in International Relations from the UK and writes on trade policy, institutional reform, and Ghana-UK relations for audiences across Africa, the United Kingdom, and the wider Global South.