Public money without public scrutiny is not investment. It is risk.
Three civil society organisations, BudgIT Ghana, the Integrated Social Development Centre (ISODEC), and Revenue Mobilisation Africa (RMA), have issued a joint demand for the Government of Ghana to publish comprehensive implementation data on the GH¢30 billion Big Push Infrastructure Programme, the flagship capital expenditure initiative outlined in the 2026 Budget. Their intervention is not merely procedural. It surfaces a deeper governance question that cuts across West Africa: when states deploy sovereign resources at scale, what institutional mechanisms actually enforce transparency, and what happens when those mechanisms are absent?
The Big Push Programme is, by any regional standard, an ambitious undertaking. Designed to drive productivity through investments in roads, bridges, ports, and logistics corridors, it also anchors the government’s 24-Hour Economy agenda. Parliament has approved multi-year commitments for 33 road projects. The Ministry of Roads and Highways has confirmed that contracts were awarded in 2025, with work underway on 50 projects covering 1,144 kilometres, and 77 road projects currently in execution, including 54 new Big Push initiatives and 23 ongoing schemes. The Accra-Kumasi Expressway and the Ekye Amanfrom-Adawso Bridge have been designated as key transformational anchors.
None of that is in dispute. What the CSOs contest is the quality of disclosure surrounding how those commitments were reached, and whether citizens possess the information necessary to hold the state accountable for their execution.
The Accountability Gap in Public Infrastructure Financing
The organisations argue that no comprehensive framework exists in the public domain listing all Big Push projects with their locations, funding sources, procurement processes, and implementation milestones. Contract awards, tender notices, evaluation results, contractor identities, contract values, and post-award variations remain largely inaccessible. Without clearly published commencement and completion dates, independent monitoring is structurally impossible.
“Transparency cannot be replaced with promises,” said Jennifer A. Moffatt, Country Director of BudgIT Ghana. “Citizens are entitled to know what has been approved, how much is going to each project, and what the timelines are; otherwise, there is no accountability and no way for citizens to know that public funds are being spent as intended.”
This is not a critique of ambition. It is a critique of process. The CSOs are invoking Ghana’s own Public Financial Management Act, which sets disclosure obligations for capital expenditure, as the normative baseline the programme has yet to meet. Their concern is concrete: inadequate disclosure creates conditions for the misappropriation of public funds, and the use of oil revenues and extractive sector proceeds earmarked for the programme makes that risk structurally significant.
A Regional Governance Standard Ghana Cannot Afford to Fall Below
Ghana’s credibility as a governance anchor in West Africa is not incidental to this debate. It is central. Accra has historically positioned itself as a benchmark for democratic accountability and institutional quality within the ECOWAS space, a reputation that has directly shaped its access to international capital markets, multilateral financing, and foreign direct investment. That positioning is now under fiscal stress following the 2023 debt restructuring, and the Big Push Programme is partly a signal to investors and development partners that the state retains the capacity to execute large-scale public investment responsibly.
Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana’s most direct regional competitor for infrastructure-linked FDI, operates a more integrated project disclosure architecture through its National Development Plan, with systematic reporting to both Parliament and the public. Senegal, under its Vision 2050 framework, has moved toward project-level transparency portals that allow citizens and investors to track disbursements against physical progress. Nigeria, despite its institutional fragmentation, has the Infrastructure Corporation of Nigeria publishing periodic portfolio updates. Ghana, with stronger democratic institutions than most of its peers, should not be trailing this regional curve.
Within the AfCFTA framework, infrastructure connectivity is not a domestic policy question in isolation. The Accra-Kumasi Expressway and the port and logistics corridor investments under Big Push directly affect Ghana’s capacity to serve as a transit and trade facilitation hub for landlocked Sahelian economies. ECOWAS infrastructure protocols require member states to maintain transparency in cross-border project financing precisely because opacity in one country’s procurement creates friction for regional integration. When Ghana cannot demonstrate clean, auditable project execution, it weakens the institutional credibility of the corridor investments themselves.
What Institutional Reform Actually Requires
The CSOs have been specific in their demands, and specificity matters here. They call for a regularly updated public disclosure portal covering all Big Push projects, project-specific budget and financing breakdowns, full procurement documentation including tender notices and evaluation results, and a comprehensive implementation framework mapping milestones to responsible agencies. They also call for quarterly reports to Parliament and the public, with supporting financial documentation, in line with the Public Financial Management Act.
These are not radical demands. They describe standard practice in any state that has internalized open contracting principles, and Ghana has formally committed to those principles through its membership in international transparency frameworks. The gap between formal commitment and operational practice is precisely where governance credibility is won or lost.
The Bank of Ghana and the Ministry of Finance carry institutional responsibility here that extends beyond the Ministry of Roads and Highways. If oil revenues and extractive sector funds are being channelled into Big Push financing, the Ghana Revenue Authority and the Public Interest and Accountability Committee, the statutory body overseeing petroleum revenue management, must be part of the disclosure architecture. Their silence in the current debate is itself a governance signal.
Ghana’s Parliament, which has already approved multi-year commitments for 33 road projects, holds a co-equal accountability function. Quarterly reporting to Parliament, as the CSOs recommend, is not a courtesy. It is a constitutional obligation that turns legislative approval into genuine oversight rather than a one-time authorization that disappears into executive discretion.
The institutional logic is straightforward. A GH¢30 billion programme that operates without systematic public disclosure does not merely risk misappropriation. It forfeits the governance dividend that transparent infrastructure investment is supposed to generate: investor confidence, citizen trust, and the institutional credibility that makes the next large-scale programme easier to finance and execute. Ghana built that credibility over decades. The Big Push Programme, executed opaquely, could erode it faster than any debt restructuring ever did.
