Ghana’s inflation rate in June 2026 was 5.3 per cent. In December 2022 it was above 50 per cent. Public debt has fallen from 92.6 per cent of GDP to 45.3 per cent. The cedi appreciated 41 per cent against the dollar in 2025 — its first annual gain in almost three decades. In July the IMF completed the sixth and final review of Ghana’s bailout programme.
By almost every headline measure, Ghana is in dramatically better shape than when Ken Ofori-Atta left the Finance Ministry in February 2024. So the question in the title looks easy. It isn’t, because it is actually three separate questions that get argued as one — and people talking past each other are usually answering different ones.
Question one: did the crisis happen on his watch?
Yes, and this is not seriously disputed.
Ofori-Atta was appointed in January 2017 and held the post for seven years. In that time Ghana went from a country with market access and single-digit inflation to one locked out of international capital markets entirely. World Bank figures put growth at 3.8 per cent in 2022 with debt at 92.6 per cent of GDP.
His defenders point to circumstances that were genuinely not of his making: the pandemic, the commodity shock following the invasion of Ukraine, a strengthening dollar, and global rate rises that hit frontier-market borrowers hardest. All real, and all affected Ghana’s neighbours too.
What the external-shocks defence doesn’t cover is why Ghana entered those shocks with so little room. Borrowing had been heavy through the good years, and the fiscal buffers that might have absorbed a bad one were not there. Shocks reveal balance sheets; they don’t create them.
Question two: who paid for the fix?
This is where the honest answer stops being comfortable, and it is the part that headline statistics hide completely.
The Domestic Debt Exchange Programme, announced by Ofori-Atta on 4 December 2022, restructured roughly GHS137 billion of domestic bonds. Holders swapped instruments paying 15–21 per cent for new bonds starting at coupons as low as zero, with maturities stretching out as far as fifteen years.
The people holding those bonds were not only banks. They were pensioners, middle-class savers, and small investment groups. The Economic Governance Platform puts individual losses in present-value terms at 30 to 50 per cent, notes that more than 3,000 retirees reported financial distress, and records that some could not afford medication or housing after coupon payments stopped in 2023. Bondholder groups themselves estimated losses far higher.
Pensioners picketed the Finance Ministry for weeks. They eventually won a partial exemption — after the initial damage was done. The government had originally promised to protect individual bondholders and retirement savings, then chose its IMF debt targets over that commitment when the arithmetic wouldn’t close.
The fiscal case for the DDEP is strong: MyJoyOnline reports it delivered around ten percentage points of the debt-ratio reduction and, on a later finance minister’s account, roughly $12 billion in savings. It also opened the door to the IMF programme and the eventual Eurobond restructuring. Somebody was always going to absorb that loss.
But “the restructuring worked” and “retirees lost half their savings” are both true, and the recovery statistics only record the first one. If you are asking whether a particular Ghanaian is worse off, the answer depends enormously on whether they were holding government bonds in 2022.
Question three: who gets credit for the recovery?
This is a live political fight, and both sides have a point.
The Mahama government, in office since January 2025, presides over the numbers at the top of this piece. The opposition NPP argues it is claiming credit for gains built on groundwork laid earlier — and there is something to that, in the sense that the debt restructuring which made the improvement arithmetically possible was executed before they arrived.
Against that: restructuring creates the possibility of recovery, not the recovery itself. The IMF’s final review credits a primary surplus of 2.1 per cent of GDP in 2025 and reserves nearly doubling to $11.9 billion. Those came from execution after 2024.
And a third factor belongs to neither party. The cedi’s historic rally rode gold prices at record highs and a weakening dollar. SBM Intelligence notes the Bank of Ghana spent close to $10 billion defending it, and flags a debt-currency paradox: much of Ghana’s liability stock is still foreign-currency denominated, so a spell of cedi weakness could inflate the debt again quickly. The cedi has already depreciated 7.9 per cent against the dollar in the first half of 2026.
What the criminal case is, and is not
Ofori-Atta faces 75 counts brought by the Office of the Special Prosecutor, reduced from an original 78. The charges relate to matters including the Strategic Mobilisation–GRA contract, the termination of the ECG-BXC contract, National Cathedral payments, ambulance procurement, and use of the Tax Refund Account. He was detained by US immigration authorities in January 2026, and his trial is due to resume on 27 August 2026 following a Supreme Court ruling that upheld the OSP’s prosecutorial powers.
He has not been convicted of anything. His co-accused pleaded not guilty when charges were re-read in February. In June his lawyers announced a US immigration court had granted him permanent residency, which some Ghanaian commentary read as a verdict on the charges themselves; the OSP has rejected that reading, pointing out it was not party to the immigration proceedings and that the extradition papers were never before that court.
The important point for anyone assessing his record: these allegations concern specific procurement and contract decisions. They are legally distinct from the macroeconomic question. A finance minister can preside over a debt crisis without having committed an offence, and can be convicted of one without that being what caused the crisis. Collapsing the two is the most common error in this argument, and both his critics and his defenders make it.
So — worse off?
Compared to 2022, no. Ghana today has lower inflation, a stronger currency, half the debt burden and a completed IMF programme.
Compared to 2017, when he took office, the picture is harder. Ghana passed through a crisis that destroyed a substantial amount of private savings, cost it capital-market access for years, and required a restructuring whose costs fell heavily on people with the least capacity to absorb them. The recovery is real. It is a recovery from a hole, and the hole was dug during his tenure.
The fairest verdict available on current evidence: he presided over the crisis and he also executed the painful, unpopular fix that made the exit possible. Both belong on the ledger. Anyone offering you only one half of that is selling something.
Why this matters from abroad
If you send money to Ghana, you have felt all of this directly. A 41 per cent cedi appreciation means the same dollar bought substantially less in Accra through 2025 — good for relatives holding cedi savings, worse for the purchasing power of what you send. The 7.9 per cent depreciation so far in 2026 pushes the other way.
And if you have older relatives who held government bonds, they may still be carrying losses from 2022 that no recovery statistic will ever record. That is the version of this question that matters most in actual households, and it is the one the headline numbers are worst at answering.
Figures from the IMF, World Bank, KPMG and Bank of Ghana as reported by MyJoyOnline, Ghanaian Times, Adomonline, GBC and SBM Intelligence. Analysis is my own. Mr Ofori-Atta has pleaded not guilty and the charges against him are untested allegations. Accurate as of 19 August 2026.
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