President John Dramani Mahama has told the leadership of Ghana’s state institutions that no state-owned enterprise may maintain a compensation arrangement outside the established national framework, whatever its corporate status or ability to generate revenue.
He issued the directive at the SIGA Governing Boards and CEOs’ Conference in Accra on Thursday, September 10, 2026. The declaration accompanies a structural change already underway, as the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission transitions into a proposed Independent Public Emoluments Commission.
President Mahama presented that transition as the opening to build a remuneration system in which executive pay tracks institutional performance rather than corporate self-assessment.
The President put the fairness question in shareholder terms. Salaries and allowances that rise systematically inside chronically loss-making enterprises, he said, are not fair to the shareholders, meaning the Ghanaian public that owns those institutions.
He drew the corollary carefully. High-performing public enterprises and their leaders should be appropriately recognised. What cannot continue is poor performance rewarded indefinitely without consequence.
That framing matters because it rejects both extremes on offer. President Mahama is not proposing a blanket squeeze on public sector pay, and he is not accepting the argument that commercially successful state enterprises should set their own terms. He is proposing that the two move together.
What the new framework must measure
Under the emerging system, compensation at the executive level cannot be determined in isolation from institutional performance.
The President listed the factors that must shape it, naming the enterprise’s financial health, its productivity, achievement of agreed targets, quality of service delivered, fiscal sustainability, and the broader value created for the state and the people.
He was explicit that the exercise is not primarily about holding salaries down. “This is not simply about controlling salaries. It is about creating the right incentive for performance, strengthening accountability, and ensuring value for money,” President Mahama said.
The President signalled the scale of the change directly to the room, telling delegates that the appearance of the Fair Wages chief executive on their programme was deliberate and that a monumental shift in how remuneration and compensation are handled is coming.
What boards and chief executives must now do?
President Mahama set out obligations rather than aspirations. He expects all boards, board chairpersons, chief executives, managing directors and management teams of state-owned enterprises and other specified entities to cooperate fully with SIGA and the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission through the transition.
That cooperation carries three components. Entities must submit accurate information on compensation, conditions of service, financial performance and other institutional data on time. They must participate fully in benchmarking and compensation reviews. And they must comply strictly with approved remuneration frameworks and government directives.
The President then closed the escape route that revenue-generating entities have historically used. Institutional autonomy, he said, cannot become a licence for unjustified disparities, opaque compensation practices, or remuneration bearing no relationship to performance.
A harmonised framework across agencies
Rather than leave implementation to a single institution, President Mahama assigned it across several.
He expects SIGA, the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission, the Ministry of Finance, sector ministries and the boards and chief executives of state-owned enterprises to work together on a harmonised framework linking corporate performance, executive accountability and compensation.
The objective he set is that every cedi the state invests in compensation must ultimately contribute to productivity, stronger institutional performance and measurable public value. That standard connects to a broader warning he delivered on the use of profits.
President Mahama told boards they must not deploy earnings that rightly belong to the Ghanaian people to finance the creature comforts of management and boards, and that retained earnings must be justified by credible investment plans that strengthen the entity and build long-term value.
The wider stakes
The President linked enterprise finances to fiscal capacity in plain terms. Every cedi transferred, guaranteed or written off on behalf of a poorly managed enterprise, he said, reduces what government can invest in classrooms, clinics, roads, jobs and social protection.
Government will act as a responsible shareholder on behalf of the people, he added, but it will not extend indefinite support to institutions that refuse to reform. Boards and management must raise revenue, control costs, manage debt, protect cash flows and address structural inefficiencies before those weaknesses harden into fiscal risks.
How much of this survives contact with entrenched arrangements remains to be seen, since the harmonisation President Mahama described requires four institutions and dozens of boards to surrender discretion many have exercised for years.
The transition to the Independent Public Emoluments Commission is where that resistance, if it comes, will show itself first.
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