The International Monetary Fund has identified the appointment of state enterprise chief executives by the President rather than by their own boards as a structural weakness in Ghana’s corporate governance, arguing that it severs the accountability link between oversight and management performance.
The assessment appears in the Fund’s technical assistance report on Ghana’s state-owned enterprises, dated July 2026 and published on 9 September. The problem the Fund describes is one of incentives rather than personalities.
A chief executive whose appointment and tenure rest with political principals has limited reason to treat board scrutiny as consequential, and a board that cannot ultimately remove a chief executive has limited reason to press hard.
How appointments work now
The report states that the chief executive or managing director of a Ghanaian state enterprise is typically appointed by the President, often in consultation with the relevant sector minister, rather than selected by the board through a competitive process.
Boards retain informal influence over how long a chief executive serves, but they are not the deciding authority. That arrangement diverges from OECD guidance, which holds that boards should carry clear authority and responsibility to appoint and dismiss chief executives on performance grounds and in line with the company’s long-term interests.
The Fund warns that Ghana’s approach can discourage boards from robustly challenging management, while giving chief executives reason to be more responsive to political principals than to the directors nominally supervising them.
The missing procedures
Beyond who holds the final say, the report finds that formal and transparent procedures for selecting both board members and chief executives remain insufficiently articulated and institutionalised.
Appointments at some entities proceed without clear merit-based criteria, competency profiles or standardised vetting, which the Fund says raises the risk of politicisation, weakens accountability, dilutes fiduciary responsibility and ultimately damages performance.
The report makes a point that cuts against the assumption that centralised appointment power serves the appointing authority. While ultimate authority rests with the President, the absence of clear and transparent selection procedures undermines the President’s own ability to identify and recruit the best available talent for these positions.
Without a vetted pool and a defined competency profile, the office is choosing from whoever surfaces rather than from the field.
Nothing published for the public to judge
Disclosure emerges as a parallel gap. The Fund notes limited public disclosure of the criteria used for appointments and of the outcomes of board evaluations.
That contrasts with practice among ownership entities in comparable systems, which typically publish competency frameworks for directors, recruit through open or professional search processes, and disclose the skills composition of their boards.
Where none of that reaches the public, citizens have no basis on which to assess whether a given appointment was justified.
SIGA’s progress and its constraints
The report credits SIGA with adding structure and capacity around appointments while identifying what still limits the effort. The Authority is assembling a pool of directors, provides governance training when funding allows, and promotes annual board evaluations. Its difficulty lies in supply.
SIGA struggles to find enough suitably skilled and experienced candidates, particularly for technical sectors where the specialist knowledge required to supervise an energy utility or a port authority is scarce.
The qualifier on training is telling. Governance training happens when funding allows, which places a core element of the State Ownership Policy at the mercy of budget cycles rather than treating it as a standing obligation.
The Fund recommends that authorities encourage board members to undertake structured programmes in corporate governance and board effectiveness, linking that capacity directly to stronger oversight, better decisions and improved financial performance.
The wider stakes
These findings sit alongside the report’s fiscal analysis, which puts aggregate SOE liabilities at roughly GH¢282 billion in 2024, about a quarter of GDP, and identifies approximately GH¢18.6 billion in financial management irregularities drawn from the 2024 Auditor-General’s assessment.
The governance argument and the financial one are the same argument. Irregularities of that scale point to weak internal control and thin board challenge, which is precisely what a board with no authority over its own chief executive is likely to produce.
President Mahama told state entity leaders at the SIGA conference last Thursday that boards govern while management manages. The IMF’s finding suggests the harder problem lies one level above that distinction, in who decides whether either group keeps its job.
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