President John Dramani Mahama has ordered board chairpersons of Ghana’s state institutions to stop taking up offices inside their entities and reporting to work daily as though they hold full-time executive posts. He issued the instruction at the SIGA Governing Boards and CEOs’ Conference in Accra on Thursday.
The President treated the practice as a governance failure rather than a question of style, arguing that a board absorbed into daily operations loses the distance it needs to hold management to account.
He balanced the correction with a warning to the other side of the table, telling chief executives that executive authority is a measurable responsibility and not a personal privilege.
President Mahama defined the board’s job precisely. It carries strategic direction, policy, risk oversight, the integrity of financial reporting and institutional performance, and membership in it is neither ceremonial nor an entitlement.
Chief executives, for their part, must deliver results in line with the law, government policy and the strategic direction their board approves. “The distinction must remain clear. Boards govern and management manages,” the President said.
He then named how each side breaks it. A board that takes over routine operational decisions weakens accountability through interference. A chief executive who resists legitimate oversight weakens it just as surely. Both, in his assessment, damage the institution they were appointed to protect.
Independent judgement expected
The President asked every board member to think critically, scrutinise proposals, ask difficult questions and put the public interest ahead of convenience.
He then named a pressure familiar to appointees under any administration. Loyalty to government, he warned, must never be mistaken for silence when a decision could harm the enterprise or the Republic.
Appointment to a board or to management is a public trust, and political affiliation, personal relationships or proximity to power cannot substitute for competence, integrity, diligence and performance.
President Mahama stated flatly that his administration will not tolerate conflict of interest or abuse of office. Procurement must be lawful, competitive and transparent. Recruitment and promotion must rest on merit. Contracts, investments and asset disposals must survive scrutiny and demonstrate value for money.
Personal responsibility for state assets
The President placed custody of physical assets directly on boards, covering land, buildings, equipment and investments in their care. His language sharpened noticeably at that point. Unauthorised disposal, encroachment or dissipation of state assets, he said, is not a minor administrative lapse but a breach of trust against the people of Ghana.
To discipline spending, President Mahama set out three questions every significant expenditure must answer. Is it necessary? Is it economical, and does it give value for money? Does it advance the entity’s mandate and create public value? Where the answer to any one of them is no, the expenditure must not be approved.
He carried the same demand into risk management, requiring boards to understand the financial, operational, legal, technological, environmental and reputational risks facing their entities, and to ensure that risk registers, audit committees and internal audit functions work as active instruments of governance rather than structures that exist on paper.
A new framework for joint venture representatives
President Mahama singled out the government’s interests in joint venture companies as needing tighter supervision. State representatives on those boards, he said, must not operate in isolation or surface only once a problem has hardened into a crisis.
He has asked SIGA to establish and enforce a clear reporting and coordination framework covering every government representative serving on a joint venture board. Those representatives must report regularly and in writing on material decisions, financial performance, emerging risks and anything affecting the state’s interest.
The principle behind it is that state representatives may sit on many boards but serve one Republic, and must therefore answer to a single ownership policy, a single standard of conduct and a single loyalty.
Redefining what counts as success
Beneath the specific instructions sat a challenge to how state institutions judge themselves. For too long, President Mahama said, some have treated survival as achievement. Paying salaries, keeping the lights on and meeting routine obligations may all be necessary, but none of it proves success.
He told every board chairperson and chief executive to prepare an answer to a harder question about what additional value their entity created this year, whether in profits, jobs, infrastructure, service delivery, national capability or the experience of ordinary citizens, and to back that answer with evidence.
President Mahama closed the governance section by asking leaders to build institutions rather than personal fiefdoms, recruit and promote on merit, develop talent and put credible succession plans in place.
An institution that destabilises the moment its chief executive changes, he observed, has not yet built systems capable of outlasting anyone. Few entities in the room could have heard that without recognising themselves.
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