Private legal practitioner and activist Osagyefo Oliver Barker-Vormawor has argued that the biggest obstacle to building a functioning Ghanaian state may be the state itself, setting out a nine-point critique of the country’s civil and public service in a commentary published this week.
The #FixTheCountry convener contends that political leaders have spent decades trying to capture the state without ever learning to run it, leaving behind an unelected bureaucracy that sets its own terms and answers to almost no one.
“For years, political leadership has been so consumed with accessing and distributing the spoils of office that it has neglected the less glamorous work of actually governing institutions: setting standards, demanding performance, supervising implementation and maintaining a professional public service.”
Osagyefo Oliver Barker-Vormawor, Legal Practitioner and Activist
His central claim is that Ghana remains largely ungoverned, a verdict he delivers not against any single administration but against the machinery all of them inherit. Into that vacuum, he argued, has grown an enormous unelected bureaucracy exercising power without meaningful supervision or accountability.
Ministers come and go, and governments change, he wrote, but the bureaucracy remains, develops its own habits, protects its own interests and in too many places decides for itself what government policy will actually mean in practice.
The formulation inverts a familiar complaint. Where public frustration usually settles on politicians who fail to deliver, Barker-Vormawor points to what happens between the announcement of a policy and its execution, a stretch over which elected officials often have less command than the public assumes.
The Blame Falls Where the Power Does Not
He identified an irony at the centre of the arrangement. Elected governments carry the blame for everything the state does while exercising remarkably little control over the machinery through which they are supposed to govern.
That mismatch, in his account, corrodes accountability at both ends. Voters punish administrations for failures they may not have authored, while the officials who shaped the outcome face no electoral test and rarely any administrative one. Each new government arrives with a mandate and discovers that the institutions meant to deliver it operate on their own logic.
The activist moved quickly to close off a reading he clearly anticipated. His argument is not for politicising the public service but quite the opposite, he wrote, adding that enough destructive intermeddling has already worsened the service.
The clarification matters in a country where changes of government routinely bring waves of dismissals and reappointments across state agencies, and where the neutrality of the public service has been contested through successive administrations.
Barker-Vormawor’s position is that partisan interference has been part of the damage rather than a remedy for it.
What Ghana needs instead, in his formulation, is a fiercely professional, politically neutral and technically competent public service. He then drew the distinction his entire argument turns on, insisting that independence from partisan interference cannot mean independence from standards, supervision, performance and accountability.
No Consequences for Institutional Failure
The consequence follows directly from that distinction. A developmental state cannot be built, he wrote, when the permanent machinery of government can ignore elected authority, frustrate policy, resist reform and suffer virtually no consequences for institutional failure.
The four verbs describe an escalating scale, from passive non-compliance through active obstruction, and his point is that none of them currently attracts a penalty. Ghana’s record of sanctioning career officials for institutional failure is thin, and the absence of consequence is what allows the pattern to persist across administrations of both major parties.
“Our politicians have spent decades trying to capture the state. In the process, they forgot to govern it: Ghana remains largely ungoverned! All I see around is turfs and fiefdoms that function under capture and bend to the will of the more audaciously corrupt!”
Osagyefo Oliver Barker-Vormawor, Legal Practitioner and Activist
A Familiar Voice on Institutional Reform
Barker-Vormawor holds degrees from the University of Ghana and Harvard Law School and has practised with Covington and Burling. He co-founded the #FixTheCountry movement, was charged with treason felony in 2022 over the E-Levy protests, and helped convene the Occupy Julorbi House demonstrations in 2023 and 2024.
He has been among the more persistent commentators on Ghana’s ongoing constitutional reform process, urging in July that the government’s position paper on the Constitution Review Committee report reflect national rather than partisan aspirations.
That debate has centred largely on the architecture of elected office, including presidential terms and the separation of Parliament from the Executive. His argument here points elsewhere, to the permanent apparatus that no constitutional amendment automatically reaches.
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