Legal scholar and governance advocate Professor Stephen Kwaku Asare, popularly known as Kwaku Azar, has rejected attempts to portray the IMF’s July 2026 report on Ghana’s state-owned enterprises as an attack on the government.
He said the IMF mission that produced the report was invited by the Ghanaian authorities to provide technical assistance.
“The IMF mission was invited by Ghanaian authorities for technical assistance. It is therefore difficult to portray the report as an unprovoked attack on a government that invited the mission,” he said in a post on social media.
According to Kwaku Azar, the report also recognised several reforms undertaken by successive Ghanaian governments over the past decade.
These include the establishment of the State Interests and Governance Authority, the State Ownership Policy, the Corporate Governance Code, standardised financial reporting, performance contracts, improved external audits and stronger monitoring of fiscal risks.
He said the problem identified by the IMF was that these reforms had not produced the financial results expected from state-owned enterprises.
“Governance framework improved, financial performance did not correspondingly improve,” he said.
Kwaku Azar pointed to the increase in SOE liabilities from about GH¢35 billion in 2015 to GH¢282 billion in 2024.
He said the figures showed a gap between putting rules and institutions in place and achieving better performance from state-owned enterprises.
“The disconnect between formal reform and actual performance is the key issue,” he said.
He therefore urged Ghanaians to focus on what the report actually says instead of treating it as a political attack.
The report, he said, should be seen as an assessment of a decade-long reform effort and not as a political statement against one administration.
