Opinion by Good Governance Africa – West African Regional Office (GGA-WARO)
A new opinion piece by the Good Governance Africa – West African Regional Office (GGA-WARO) argues that while Ghana’s newly signed Value for Money Office Act represents progress in strengthening accountability, attempts to weaken the Office of the Special Prosecutor risk undermining the country’s broader anti-corruption efforts.
The article examines what the group describes as contradictions within Ghana’s current governance and accountability framework, warning that strong institutions must be protected consistently if public trust is to be maintained. Read below.
Signing the Value for Money Office Act is a genuine step forward for Ghana. But passing good laws while dismantling independent prosecutors sends a contradictory message to citizens, to investors, and to a watching continent.
By the GGA-WARO Anti-Corruption Desk | 11th May 2026
On 11th May 2026, President John Mahama signed the Value for Money Office Act into law. We want to begin by saying, plainly and without reservation: this is good news. Ghana’s public procurement space has for too long been a theatre of inflated contracts, opaque sole-source awards, and expenditure that bears little relationship to the services actually delivered to citizens. An institution with a clear mandate to screen contracts, interrogate sole-source justifications, and hold the line on public spending is exactly the kind of structural reform that accountability-minded organisations like ours have been calling for. President Mahama and the Parliament of Ghana deserve credit for this.
And yet, we find ourselves unable to celebrate without also asking a question. How does a government pass a law designed to strengthen accountability on a Monday, while at the same time pursuing legal action to weaken one of the country’s most important accountability institutions on every other day of the week? Because that, in essence, is what is happening in Ghana right now. The same period that produced the Value for Money Office Act has also produced a High Court ruling backed by the Attorney General’s Office that would require the Office of the Special Prosecutor to obtain prior AG approval before prosecuting a single case. These two things cannot be reconciled by any honest account of what accountability governance actually requires.
“You cannot build a house of accountability with one hand and quietly pull out its foundations with the other. Institutions are not symbols. They are the machinery through which promises become reality.”
The deeper issue here is not about any single law or any single court case. It is about the kind of institutional culture Ghana is choosing to build. Every nation that has achieved sustained development, the kind that outlasts any particular government and continues to improve ordinary lives from one decade to the next, has done so on the back of strong, independent institutions. Not perfect institutions. Not institutions that are never challenged or reformed. But institutions that are genuinely free to do their work, whose mandates are respected even when they are inconvenient, and whose effectiveness is protected across changes in political leadership.
In too many parts of Africa, we have watched a painful and repeating pattern. A well-designed institution is created with fanfare, staffed with capable people, and initially celebrated by donors and civil society alike. Then, as the institution begins to do what it was built to do i.e., investigate, prosecute, and report findings that embarrass the powerful, the pressure mounts. The budget gets squeezed. A legal challenge materialises. The leadership is questioned. Slowly and almost invisibly, the institution loses the very independence that made it worth creating. What remains carries the name and the logo but not the substance. Citizens are left with the illusion of accountability without the reality.
It is also worth making a practical point. The Value for Money Office Act, welcome as it is, will only deliver on its promise if there is a credible enforcement ecosystem around it. Screening contracts and identifying inflated procurement is valuable work. But what happens when the people responsible for those inflated contracts are powerful enough to resist administrative findings? What happens when the evidence of wrongdoing points upward rather than downward? At that point, the work of the Value for Money Office must connect to an institution capable of independent prosecution. An OSP that has to ask the Attorney General for permission before acting is not that institution. The two laws, in other words, need each other to work. Undermining one weakens the other.
“Governments come and go. That is as it should be in a democracy. But institutions, when built well and protected carefully, outlast all of us. They are the infrastructure of justice.”
Governments come and go. That is as it should be in a democracy. Elections matter, and political leadership matters. But institutions, when built well and protected carefully, outlast all of us. They are the infrastructure of justice. A government that builds strong institutions and then respects their independence even when doing so is uncomfortable leaves behind a legacy that no single policy announcement can match. A government that creates institutions only to bring them under political control when they become inconvenient leaves behind something far more corrosive: the settled belief, in the minds of citizens and officials alike, that accountability is always ultimately optional.
We say this to Ghana’s leaders, across all parties and all branches, with respect and with directness. The continent is watching. West Africa is watching. There are governments in this sub-region that will take their cue from what Ghana does next not from what Ghana says, but from what Ghana does. If this country demonstrates that an independent special prosecutor can be brought to heel through legal manoeuvring, that lesson will travel. If it demonstrates instead that such an institution can be protected, properly resourced, and allowed to operate with genuine independence, that lesson will also travel. The choice of which example to set belongs to the leaders and the courts of Ghana, and to the citizens who hold them to account.
GGA-WARO calls on the government of Ghana to adopt what we are calling an integrated accountability agenda; one that does not treat accountability institutions as a menu from which convenient items can be selected and inconvenient ones discarded. Sign the Value for Money Office Act and resource it properly. Defend the OSP’s independence before the Supreme Court. Ensure that the institutions designed to check the abuse of public power are strengthened consistently, across administrations and across the political cycle. The Ghanaian public, and the millions across West Africa who look to this country as a model, deserve nothing less.
Ghana has produced, in a short period of time, some genuinely impressive institutional architecture for accountability. The Value for Money Office is the latest addition. But architecture without foundations is just a façade. The foundations of this accountability architecture are independent institutions that can pursue their mandates without fear or favour. Let us build on what we have. Let us not, having built it, quietly take it apart.
