A single road contract, awarded once, paid multiple times over, and never completed. That is the procurement dynamic Ghana’s Deputy Minister of Roads and Highways, Alhassan Suhuyini, described on 18 September 2026, and it cuts to the core of why West Africa’s second-largest economy has spent heavily on road infrastructure while its networks remain demonstrably incomplete.
Suhuyini’s account, delivered on Eyewitness News, was not a generalised complaint about contractor performance. It was a precise description of a self-reinforcing mechanism: a contractor secures a GHS 5 million contract for a two-kilometre road, executes work valued at roughly GHS 1 million, and submits a payment certificate. When the government delays settlement, as Ghana’s Ministry of Finance has routinely done given persistent fiscal constraints, statutory interest accrues on the outstanding balance. The contractor then applies a portion of the eventual payment to execute incremental additional work, raises a new certificate, and the cycle restarts. Years pass. The road remains unfinished. The liability on the government’s books expands. “A road that should cost you 1 million Ghana cedis will end up costing you about GHS 5 million, and you may not even have the road,” Suhuyini said.
What makes this pattern institutionally significant is that it did not emerge from isolated bad actors. It reflects a procurement architecture in which payment delays, weak site supervision, and permissive contract renegotiation norms combined to create predictable incentives for underperformance. Contractors operating rationally within that architecture had little reason to accelerate completion; an unfinished road generating interest and eligible for price escalation was more financially rewarding than a delivered one. Suhuyini himself acknowledged the systemic character of the problem, describing it as “a scheme where people fed on road contracts for years without ever finishing a particular road.”
The governance failure here operates on at least three distinct levels. First, at the procurement stage, contract award processes appear to have insufficiently weighted contractor capacity and track record against price. Second, at the payment stage, chronic arrears created the interest liability that made delay profitable. Third, at the supervision stage, the absence of consistent on-site monitoring allowed contractors to demobilise without consequence. Each failure reinforced the others, and together they produced what economists studying public investment management in sub-Saharan Africa have identified as a “commitment problem”: governments announce infrastructure spending, but institutional weaknesses prevent that spending from translating into physical assets.
Ghana’s predicament is not unique within the ECOWAS region, but its scale carries particular weight. As a signatory to the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement and a country whose road network connects landlocked neighbours including Burkina Faso and Mali to Atlantic ports, the quality and completeness of Ghanaian road infrastructure carries direct implications for regional trade facilitation. The ECOWAS Protocol on Transit Transport and the broader AfCFTA goods trade framework both depend on member states maintaining functional cross-border corridors. When procurement dysfunction inflates road costs fivefold while leaving projects incomplete, the damage extends beyond Ghana’s own fiscal position and into the connective tissue of West African commerce.
Comparative data from the region sharpens the picture. Ivory Coast, Ghana’s principal economic competitor on the Gulf of Guinea, has in recent years attracted greater volumes of logistics-sector foreign direct investment, partly on the basis of port and road infrastructure that international operators regard as more reliably delivered. Senegal’s ambitious infrastructure programme under the Plan Sénégal Émergent has similarly emphasised completion rates and public-private partnership structures designed to reduce the government’s direct exposure to contractor payment delays. Neither country has fully resolved procurement integrity challenges, but both have moved more deliberately toward performance-based contracting frameworks that tie disbursements to verified physical progress rather than submitted certificates alone.
The Western North Region project Suhuyini cited as evidence of the ministry’s new approach is instructive precisely because of what it reveals about baseline conditions. A contractor recording only two per cent physical progress six months after contract award would, under standard procurement rules in most OECD jurisdictions, trigger automatic performance bond enforcement and potential contract termination. In Ghana’s case, the ministry’s intervention consisted of a site visit, a directive to accelerate, and a subsequent inspection three months later that recorded progress rising to 21 per cent. That improvement is real and worth acknowledging. It also confirms that the prior norm was one in which no such intervention occurred, and contractors could remain effectively dormant on awarded contracts without administrative consequence.
Suhuyini’s stated remedy centres on two mechanisms: stricter timeline and budget enforcement, and strengthened monitoring and supervision. Both are necessary, and neither is sufficient on its own without addressing the upstream conditions that made the previous equilibrium stable. Payment arrears remain a structural feature of Ghana’s fiscal position; the country concluded its most recent IMF programme in 2023 and continues to manage a debt stock that constrains discretionary expenditure. As long as the Ministry of Finance cannot guarantee timely settlement of payment certificates, contractors will price delay risk into their behaviour, and the interest-accrual dynamic Suhuyini described will persist regardless of how firmly the Roads and Highways Ministry sets its timelines.
A more durable institutional fix would require integrating procurement reform with public financial management reform. Ghana’s Public Procurement Authority has the mandate to set contracting standards, but enforcement depends on line ministries maintaining adequate supervision capacity, and on the Auditor-General’s Department having both the resources and the political protection to act on findings. The Ghana Audit Service’s reports have for years documented infrastructure contract irregularities; the gap between documentation and accountability is where the systemic problem lives. Regional peers and international partners, including the World Bank, which has financed portions of Ghana’s transport sector, have consistently identified this gap in project completion reports.
For investors and regional policymakers watching Ghana’s trajectory, Suhuyini’s disclosure is a double signal. It confirms that the current administration has diagnosed a genuine structural dysfunction and is willing to name it publicly, which is a precondition for reform. It also confirms that the dysfunction was deep and longstanding enough to have absorbed substantial public resources without producing proportionate infrastructure output, which is a reminder that diagnostic honesty and institutional correction are not the same thing. Ghana’s road sector will demonstrate whether the Ministry of Roads and Highways can translate acknowledged governance failure into reformed procurement practice, and whether that practice can hold against the fiscal pressures and political economies that originally produced the cycle Suhuyini described. The regional stakes, measured in trade corridor reliability and investor confidence across ECOWAS, make that demonstration consequential well beyond Accra.
