The Minority in Parliament has declared the Bank of Ghana (BoG) “policy insolvent,” arguing that the central bank can no longer fund its core monetary operations from its own income and has instead relied on gold sales and accounting adjustments to conceal the true scale of its financial difficulties.
Speaking at a press conference, members of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) presented an alternative reading of the Bank’s 2025 audited financial statements, challenging the institution’s claim that it achieved a policy solvency surplus during the year.
The BoG defines policy solvency as its ability to finance the full cost of its monetary policy operations, including open market operations (OMO) and liquidity management, from internally generated income without external support. Based on this definition, the Bank reported a surplus of approximately GH¢5.5 billion, derived from operating income of GH¢22.2 billion against OMO costs of GH¢16.7 billion.
The Minority dismissed that conclusion. It argued that GH¢9.6 billion of the reported income came from the sale of gold assets, a category it described as non-recurring and unsustainable. Stripping out those proceeds, the group recalculated operating income at GH¢12.7 billion, producing a deficit of roughly GH¢4 billion against sterilisation costs. “Minus GH¢4 billion puts the Bank of Ghana in policy insolvency,” the Minority stated.
The group further argued that the gold sales were not a matter of portfolio rebalancing, as the BoG had previously explained, but a deliberate effort to conceal a funding shortfall. “A central bank that needs gold sales to avoid policy insolvency is operating on borrowed time,” they warned.
On the headline loss figure, the Minority challenged the BoG’s reported net loss of GH¢15.6 billion, arguing the true position is considerably worse. It pointed to an additional GH¢19.3 billion in losses recorded under Other Comprehensive Income (OCI), bringing total comprehensive loss to approximately GH¢34.9 billion. Adding back the gold sale proceeds, the group estimated the underlying loss at around GH¢44 billion.
The Minority also questioned the accounting framework used in preparing the statements. It noted that auditors KPMG disclosed the accounts were prepared under the Bank’s own policies rather than in full conformity with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), allowing certain foreign exchange and gold valuation losses to be routed through equity reserves rather than the income statement.
On the cost side, the group attributed the deterioration to two policy reversals introduced in 2025. The first was the abolition of the dynamic Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR) system, which had previously allowed the Bank to absorb liquidity at minimal cost. Its removal, the Minority argued, forced reliance on interest-bearing instruments, causing outstanding sterilisation bills to surge from GH¢32.68 billion in 2024 to GH¢93.56 billion in 2025, and interest payments to jump from GH¢6.26 billion to GH¢14.61 billion.
The second reversal involved scrapping rules requiring banks to hold cedi-equivalent reserves against foreign currency deposits, which the Minority said released excess liquidity that the BoG then had to absorb at high cost. “They flooded the system with liquidity and then paid commercial banks to mop it up,” the group argued, describing the GH¢14.61 billion in interest payments as a transfer of public resources to private balance sheets at a time when private sector credit growth fell from 28.8 percent in 2024 to negative 13.9 percent in 2025.
The BoG and government officials have pushed back, maintaining that the financial results reflect deliberate policy choices that brought inflation down by 18 percentage points, strengthened the cedi by 41 percent, and grew gross international reserves from US$9.1 billion to US$13.8 billion over the year. Parliamentary Majority spokesperson Atta Issah said the Bank’s ability to set monetary policy is grounded in statute, not its balance sheet position.
The Minority said detailed policy recommendations would follow in the coming days.
