Imagine buying a brand-new water pump for your house because the old one is sluggish, only to realise you forgot to plug the old one into the electricity grid. It sounds absurd. Yet, this is the exact governance puzzle emerging from the Ministry of Finance with the introduction of the new Value for Money (VfM) Office Bill.
In a refreshing burst of intellectual honesty that has set social media ablaze, Kwame A. Prempeh took to Facebook to lay bare the facts. His position is clear, grounded, and entirely hard to fault. The state does not need a brand-new bureaucracy to protect the public purse. What the state needs is simply to fund and unleash the highly sophisticated, world-class electronic infrastructure already built under this New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration.
When the NPP took office, it did not just talk about corruption; it systematically built the digital tools to kill it. Prempeh’s brilliant analysis reminds us that the solution to our fiscal leakages is already sitting within the Public Procurement Authority (PPA). The real challenge is not a lack of laws or offices, but rather temporary operational bottlenecks that need immediate clearing.
Look at the facts Prempeh highlighted. The Ghana Electronic Procurement System (GHANEPS) is an electronic masterpiece with the verified potential to save this country a whopping $100 million every single year. Right now, the system is stalling because the third-party developer has not been paid for nearly two years. This has led to a refusal to fix system bugs.
Similarly, the Unit Cost of Infrastructure Estimation Tool (UCoI-ET) was designed by this administration to give standard, accurate cost estimates for roads, schools, and water projects. This tool effectively stops greedy contractors from inflating project costs. Yet, its full rollout is delayed due to funding. Even the Common User Items Average Price List, which stops state agencies from buying simple office pens at luxury prices, has not seen an update since 2019 because of budget constraints.
Prempeh’s Facebook post exposes the fundamental flaw in the Ministry’s current approach. The memorandum accompanying the new Bill points to international giants like the National Audit Office in the UK and the Government Accountability Office in the US as templates Ghana must emulate. But as Prempeh rightly pointed out, these foreign bodies are not separate executive offices. They are the exact equivalents of our own Ghana Audit Service. Even more embarrassing is the Canadian example cited in the bill. The Value for Money Audit Manual is not an institution at all. It is a mere operational guidebook that was actually renamed the Performance Audit Manual years ago.
This raises a critical question: Why create a sprawling new network of VfM units across every single government department to duplicate the work of the PPA and the Audit Service?
We saw a similar rush last year with the passage of the Public Procurement Amendment Act, which made it mandatory for state entities to seek a Commitment Authorisation from the Minister for every single procurement. Done without proper consultation with the PPA, that law has simply piled up files on the Minister’s desk, creating an unnecessary bottleneck that frustrates local businesses.
Value for money assessments are highly essential for high-risk, multi-million-dollar projects. Historically, independent consultants like Crown Agents have handled these tasks brilliantly. If the state wants to build internal capacity to stop outsourcing these massive tasks, that is a noble pursuit. But creating a whole new parastatal is the wrong way to go.
The NPP has already done the heavy lifting by designing the best digital procurement architecture in Sub-Saharan Africa. The NDC left behind a broken, manual system prone to inflated, backroom contracts. The NPP brought transparency through technology. The path forward is simple: clear the debts, fund the PPA tools, and let GHANEPS work.
Ghana does not need more offices, more state salaries to pay, or more red tape. It needs to empower the heavy institutional machinery already at its disposal. Let us plug in the superior tools we have before we waste money building new ones.
