The President’s State of the Nation Address

The President delivered the first State of the Nation Address (SONA) of his second presidency on Thursday, February 27, 2025.

The SONA conveyed three things to citizens – a) the state of the nation as inherited from the Akufo-Addo administration; b) the current challenges, especially economic, confronting the nation and c) highlights of how his administration plans to address the challenges.

This ritual of delivering a SONA is an obligation the Constitution places on the President in Article 67 – “The President shall, at the beginning of each session of Parliament and before a dissolution of Parliament, deliver to Parliament a message on the state of the nation.” 

The politics of SONA

Members of Parliament from the minority side, led by the Member of Parliament (MP) for Nhyiaeso, Dr Stephen Amoah, held a press conference immediately after the President’s address to dispute his account of the state of the nation.

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has also served notice to the public that it would be delivering a “true” SONA.

I understand the politics of these things, but it raises an important point for reflection for all citizens.

The country has governing institutions that regularly capture and document information about the health of the country.

For example, the Central Bank has a database with information about the external, financial, fiscal, monetary and real sectors of the economy. 

The Ghana Statistical Services’ online data catalogue boasts 65 datasets covering population and housing, macroeconomic indicators, household income and expenditure surveys, trade indicators and living standards surveys.

The Ministry of Finance has publicly available data on the national budget, public debt and other fiscal data. 

More important, this data is also reported to other external entities who include it as part of their databases.

The World Bank’s World Development Indicators and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook database are two examples.

With all this available information, it is easy to verify what the country’s institutions have officially documented about the health of the country.

Of course, whether a particular level of GDP growth is enough or not, can be debated.

What should not be debated, in the face of the facts our institutions have documented, is whether, for example, GDP grew at a certain percentage or not.

Unless there is also a dispute over what our institutions report?

But if there is not, then this repeated cycle where partisan differences lead to a debate over the “true” state of the nation is counterproductive.

A state facing difficult times?

The President’s address pointed to some major challenges facing the country.

The debt situation is the most worrying as I reflect on the SONA.

The debt situation of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) requires immediate and serious attention. This is an area the IMF flagged for attention in its IMF Country Report No. 23/168- May 2023.

This was during the bailout talks.

In the case of COCOBOD for example, the report noted a commitment on the part of government to “structural reforms to ensure COCOBOD financial viability.”

As part of the commitment, the government promised to publish a turnaround strategy by June 2023 on how to achieve this goal of financial viability.

Credit to the past government, it did announce one of the components (produce purchase price) of the turnaround strategy.

However, there is still no comprehensive plan as promised.

Perhaps, the new administration can treat this as a legacy issue and look at the operations of all SOEs with one goal in mind - undertake the necessary structural reforms to ensure financial viability. 

The debt situation across the areas highlighted by the President raises another concern — the fiscal space to honour the administration’s commitments made during the campaign, some of which generate revenue (E-Levy for example).

Every government spends in two major categories – mandatory (debt repayment and salaries of government workers) and discretionary (things it chooses to do because of a desire to move the country’s development needle forward). 

In the face of difficulties, governments find ways to meet their mandatory spending obligations.

The challenge comes in discretionary spending. Which areas should the government prioritise, knowing the fiscal reality it faces?

In choosing priorities, the administration must also be mindful of the political implications as citizens also have great expectations.

Beyond the SONA

The President boldly declared that he would fix the economy.

The budget, to be read on March 11, will offer the first glimpse of the government’s priorities.

More important, it will also provide us with a more detailed fiscal picture of the country.

The politics of the SONA may be extended to the budget.

Hopefully, in the end, national interest will override partisan politics.

The writer is the Project Director, Democracy Project.