Mahama’s Reset Agenda: Are Human Institutions Being Ignored?

The writer

 

“The strength of a nation derives not from its infrastructure, but from the character of its people and the integrity of its institutions.” — John Dewey

There is something quietly seductive about the idea of a reset. It carries the promise of a clean slate, a nation that can look at its own reflection without flinching, acknowledge the damage done, and begin again with renewed purpose.

When President John Dramani Mahama returned to the Jubilee House on January 7, 2025, with the bold promise to “reset Ghana,” millions of Ghanaians inhaled with cautious hope. They had seen the economy bleed. They had watched the cedi crumble, prices spiral, and public debt grow so monstrous that the IMF became Ghana’s reluctant financial doctor.

The reset agenda, therefore, was not just a political slogan, it was a national lifeline. And to his credit, President Mahama has begun pulling on that lifeline with visible effort.

Fairness demands that we acknowledge what is happening before we demand what is not. In the months since assuming office, the Mahama-led government has moved with commendable urgency on Ghana’s fiscal emergency.

Negotiations with international creditors have been pursued with greater transparency. The debt restructuring process initiated under the previous administration has been continued and, in some respects, strengthened, and there are early signs of macroeconomic stabilization.

The cedi has shown relative resilience compared to its alarming free fall in 2022 and 2023.

Infrastructure conversations have resumed. Promises of roads, hospitals, and industrial zones are being discussed with a seriousness that gives ordinary Ghanaians reason to believe that the physical transformation of their communities is on the horizon. Investments in agriculture and local production are being positioned as pathways to reducing import dependency, a structurally sound argument in a country that has long exported raw materials and imported finished goods at great cost to its trade balance.

These are not trivial efforts.

Stabilising an economy that has been through the kind of turbulence Ghana experienced is genuinely hard work, and it would be intellectually dishonest to dismiss the administration’s early strides. The President deserves acknowledgment for stepping into a difficult inheritance and choosing action over excuses.

And yet this is where our concern begins. Economic stabilisation is not the same as national transformation. Resetting Ghana requires more than fixing the numbers. It requires fixing the institutions that generated the bad numbers in the first place.

Let me be precise about what we mean by human institutions. I am not simply talking about buildings or government agencies. Institutions, in the most consequential sense, are the rules, norms, incentive structures, and cultural expectations that govern how public power is exercised and how citizens relate to the state.

They include the judiciary, the civil service, the electoral commission, the police service, parliament, public universities, regulatory bodies, and the unwritten but deeply felt codes of conduct, or misconduct, that define how business gets done in the country.

These are the institutions that determine whether a road contract is awarded on merit or on proximity to power. They determine whether a nurse reports for duty or collects a salary from home. They determine whether a judge rules on law or on loyalty.

They determine whether a customs officer facilitates trade or extorts it. In short, they determine whether the physical infrastructure being promised will be maintained, or will deteriorate within a decade as has happened, painfully and repeatedly, in our recent history.

Ghana has built roads before. Ghana has constructed hospitals before. Ghana has launched industrial policies before. And yet, here we are. The question is not whether we can build things — it is whether the institutional environment in which those things exist can sustain, protect, and grow them.

On that question, the reset agenda has been conspicuously quiet.

Africa itself offers us the most instructive mirrors. Rwanda is perhaps the most cited example, and rightly so. When Paul Kagame’s government began its post-genocide reconstruction, it made a deliberate and non-negotiable commitment to institutional reform alongside physical development.

The Rwanda Governance Board was established not as a ceremonial body but as a serious accountability mechanism. Corruption was prosecuted at the highest levels, including within the ruling party. The civil service was professionalized. Public contracts were made transparent.

The result is a country that, despite its small size and limited natural resources, consistently ranks as one of Africa’s most competitive economies and one of the least corrupt on the continent. Rwanda did not just build infrastructure; it built the institutional culture to protect it.

Botswana tells a similar story.

At independence in 1966, Botswana was one of the poorest countries in the world. Its transformation into one of Africa’s most stable and prosperous nations was not driven primarily by diamond revenues. What Botswana had was the deliberate construction of strong public institutions, that is, a merit-based civil service, an independent judiciary, transparent resource management through the Debswana framework, and a political culture that consistently rewarded accountability over patronage. The diamonds funded development; the institutions ensured the development endured.

Ghana could also look closer at Senegal’s recent democratic evolution. When President Faye assumed power in 2024, alongside the momentum of the PASTEF movement, one of the central commitments made was to restructure institutions of governance, not just to change who sat in them, but to change how they functioned and who they served.

Whether Senegal succeeds remains to be seen, but the intent to treat institutional reform as an inseparable companion to economic development is precisely the kind of thinking that Ghanaians should be demanding from their own reset.

Ghana’s institutions have long suffered from what can be described as a culture of institutional capture, where state bodies, rather than serving the public, serve the party in power, or worse, serve the personal interests of those appointed to lead them. This is not a partisan observation. It has been true under NDC governments. It has been true under NPP governments. The rot is structural, not political.

The Ghana Revenue Authority continues to haemorrhage billions through discretionary exemptions and opaque processes. The Public Procurement Authority oversees a system still riddled with sole-sourcing abuses.

The Auditor-General’s reports are released, admired briefly, and then filed away without consequence for those named in them. The Judiciary, despite housing genuinely brilliant legal minds, operates under a cloud of public skepticism that threatens the very legitimacy of the rule of law.

The civil service, once a proud profession, has been so politicized over successive administrations that institutional memory is lost with every change of government.

These are not small problems. They are the foundation cracks through which every development dollar eventually leaks.

President Mahama has an extraordinary opportunity. Perhaps the rarest kind in African politics, the opportunity of a man who lost power, watched what happened in his absence, and returned with a second chance. That second chance carries a moral obligation to be bolder than comfort allows.

The reset agenda must include a serious, time-bound civil service reform that insulates professional appointments from political interference. It must include a strengthened and adequately funded Office of the Special Prosecutor, one that is permitted to pursue cases without political temperature checks.

It must include judicial reforms that accelerate commercial and corruption cases, so that accountability is not a theoretical concept but a lived experience. It must include enforceable codes of conduct for public officers, with consequences that are actually applied.

None of this is glamorous. You cannot cut a ribbon on institutional integrity. You cannot photograph a reformed procurement process. But you can, over time, build a Ghana where the roads that are built do not become symbols of corruption, where the hospitals that are constructed are actually stocked with medicine, and where the factories that are opened do not close within five years because the regulatory environment strangles them.

I am not writing in the spirit of opposition. I am writing in the spirit of a citizenry that has grown tired of cyclical disappointment. Tired of watching capable leaders build impressive monuments on institutional sand. President Mahama has shown political courage before.

He has the intellectual capacity to understand what is being argued here. And he has, in the reset agenda, a framework broad enough to accommodate the institutional dimension that is currently missing from its loudest chapters.

Reset the economy, yes. Reset the infrastructure, absolutely. But Mr. President, reset the institutions, too, because a Ghana with gleaming roads and corrupt institutions is not a reset Ghana. It is just an older Ghana with newer roads.

The people are watching. And this time, they deserve more than concrete.

By Dominic Ebow Arhin (Institute for Strategic Governance, Policy, and Innovation)

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