A policy analyst and a ruling party communicator clashed on air on Saturday over whether the cedi’s sharp recovery reflects sound economic management or a fragile, intervention-driven stability that could unravel if external conditions shift.
George Domfe, president of the Africa Policy Lens and a senior research fellow at the University of Ghana, argued on Asaase Radio’s The Forum that the Bank of Ghana’s (BoG) sustained foreign exchange injections have produced an appreciation that does not reflect Ghana’s underlying economic strength. The cedi has moved from around GH₵14.9 to the dollar to approximately GH₵10.3 over recent months, a movement Domfe said was driven largely by the central bank supplying the market rather than by improved domestic fundamentals.
“You are not the one controlling it. You are using somebody’s currency to shore up your local currency,” he said. “When you use aggressive interventions to shore up your currency, you have not built a resilient economy.”
Domfe warned that the current position is sustainable only as long as the BoG can continue supplying dollars and global gold prices remain elevated. He said gold-driven inflows have been a key pillar of the recent reserve build-up but cautioned that a reversal in gold prices would reduce those inflows and expose the cedi to renewed pressure.
NDC communications team member Nana Sarfo Ogyaba, responding on the same programme, rejected the artificial stability characterisation as unfair and misplaced. “We have a president who is not an economist. Look at how he has managed the economy. For you to say the economy that we are enjoying now is artificial is quite unfortunate,” he said. Ogyaba defended the government’s borrowing record, saying debt increases had been controlled and transparently allocated, and insisted the administration remained focused on long-term stability rather than short-term optics.
Domfe did not dispute that external conditions, including lower global oil prices and improved remittance inflows, had supported the cedi alongside the central bank’s actions. His core argument was that structural conditions, specifically Ghana’s heavy import dependence, had not changed and would reassert themselves once intervention capacity contracted. “If people are demanding dollars, what do they use the dollar for? If government begins to produce what we import, demand for dollars goes down and the cedi naturally becomes stronger,” he said.
He also challenged the government’s broader resilience narrative, pointing to the more than 500,000 applicants who competed for positions in the security services as evidence that unemployment pressures remain severe despite the positive headline indicators.
The exchange reflects a wider debate about whether the macroeconomic gains recorded since early 2025 represent durable progress or a window of opportunity that has yet to be converted into structural change.
