By Dr. Gideon Boako
Every economic crisis leaves behind a clear audit trail. Numbers do not care about political slogans, and central bank vaults do not take sides during elections. When the global economic storm of the Russia-Ukraine war battered Ghana in 2022, forcing the country to seek refuge at the International Monetary Fund, the nation faced a dangerous shortage of US dollars.What followed was a masterclass in economic discipline and structural innovation under the New Patriotic Party. Today, as the new National Democratic Congress administration takes credit for a stabilized currency, a sober look at the financial balance sheet reveals a simple truth: the NDC is sailing smoothly on a sea of reserves built by the foresight of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.To understand the present stability, one must revisit the strict terms of the 2022 IMF bailout. To force Ghana to rebuild its depleted foreign exchange reserves, the IMF placed a hard ceiling on the Bank of Ghana. The central bank was restricted from injecting more than $80 million a month into the direct market to support the cedi. Later, that limit was tightened further to $60 million.For a country that relies heavily on imports for fuel, lifesaving medicines, vehicle spare parts, and basic food items, this cap was a direct threat to daily economic survival. The demand for dollars by local businesses far outstripped what the central bank was allowed to supply.Many governments would have buckled under the pressure, broken the IMF rules, or resorted to short term borrowing traps. Instead, the NPP government chose strict fiscal compliance. Day after day, week after week, the Bank of Ghana respected the cap, slowly stacking dollar reserves brick by brick. By the close of 2024, Ghana had not only met the IMF reserve targets, it had soundly exceeded them.That discipline was the exact reason the IMF felt confident enough to lift the intervention restrictions in 2025. Today, when the NDC government steps into the market and supplies dollars generously to keep the cedi calm, they are spending money stored up by the very predecessors they condemned. Without those built-up reserves, the central bank under the current administration would be legally and financially paralyzed.Yet staying compliant with the IMF was only half the battle. Ghana still had to feed its people and power its economy without access to the open dollar market. This was where Dr. Bawumia altered the course of Ghana’s monetary history.Rather than wasting the crisis, the former Vice President looked at what lay beneath Ghanaian soil. For over a century, Ghana exported raw gold, watched foreign entities refine it, and then turned around to buy back US dollars at high interest rates just to import crude oil.Bawumia introduced the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme alongside the Gold-for-Oil policy. For the first time since the founding of the republic, Ghana began buying locally mined gold with its own cedi, using that gold directly to settle international fuel bills and to shore up national reserves. The move solved two chronic economic headaches at once. It removed the massive monthly demand for dollars from bulk oil distribution companies and allowed the central bank to accumulate physical gold and foreign exchange without taking on expensive Eurobond debt.Now, the NDC points to recent central bank activities, claiming that large dollar sales in 2024 proved the NPP was burning cash. That argument deliberately conflates basic accounting metrics. The NDC claims the Bank of Ghana sold an average of $250 million a month, conveniently confusing routine foreign exchange auctions with direct market interventions. More importantly, they ignore the core fact: those larger forex flows were funded directly by Bawumia’s gold policy, not by borrowing.Politics often allows newcomers to reap where they did not sow. The NDC is currently enjoying low inflation, falling interest rates, and a stable cedi, presenting these gains to the public as evidence of their own overnight management. But the machinery keeping the Ghanaian economy afloat today was engineered in the heat of the 2022 crisis.The record is clear. Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia took a structural flaw that had plagued every Ghanaian government since 1957 and fixed it with gold. The NDC may be driving the vehicle today, but it was the NPP that built the engine, filled the tank, and paved the road.
