When the Bank of Ghana (BoG) unveiled its 2025 audited financial statements this May, revealing a staggering operating loss of GH¢15.6 billion, the partisan sirens began their predictable, deafening wail.
Almost immediately, the figure was weaponised. Outrage was manufactured in air-conditioned press rooms, and the central bank was rhetorically served up as a failing corporate carcass bleeding the nation dry.
But let us be clear: judging the entity that prints the money by the same ledger rules as the entity that uses the money is not just a mistake; it is a fundamental misreading of the macroeconomic soul.
To cut through the political smog and view this loss through the lens of cold, hard pragmatism, we must strip away the theatre. We must ask the uncomfortable questions: Where did this money go? Who truly benefited from this deficit? And, counterintuitively, why might this GH¢15.6 billion loss be the only thing keeping the Ghanaian economy from a total, fiery collapse?
To understand the present, we must touch the scars of the past. For years, the BoG maintained a modest, healthy equity. The structural rupture occurred in 2022, when the sovereign state hit the wall of insolvency. During the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP), the BoG was forced to swallow a 50% haircut on roughly GH¢67 billion of government securities.
It was a catastrophic, self-inflicted wound. That GH¢60.9 billion loss in 2022 began a cycle of negative equity that has now swelled to GH¢96.28 billion. On paper, it looks like an institutional death spiral. Critics argue that any “normal” company with such a balance sheet would be shuttered by noon.
But a central bank is not a high-street bank. Imagine a game of Monopoly. If a player runs out of cash, they are bankrupt. But if the Banker runs out of notes, the rules allow the Banker to write figures on a slip of paper to keep the game alive.
The BoG is the Banker. Its job is not to win the game; its job is to ensure the board doesn’t catch fire. As a monopoly issuer of fiat currency, it cannot “go bust” in its own coins.
When we dissect the GH¢15.6 billion loss, a different narrative emerges. This was not money lost to administrative gluttony or backroom corruption. The vast majority was an active, deliberate policy expense.
In 2025, the BoG spent GH¢16.73 billion on Open Market Operations (OMOs), nearly double the previous year. Through OMOs, the BoG pays commercial banks a fee to park their excess cash at the central bank.
Why? Think of excess liquidity as a massive flood rushing toward a village. The BoG is the engineer, and the commercial banks own the reservoirs. The BoG pays that GH¢16.7 billion “fee” to convince the banks to open their gates and trap the water. If the BoG didn’t pay to lock that money away, those billions would flood the market, chasing limited dollars and goods, and washing away the cedi’s value entirely.
The intellectually honest critique is this: the BoG is only paying for these “reservoirs” because it illegally printed money to finance government recklessness before 2023. This is the “Original Sin” of fiscal dominance.
The 2025 loss is the cost of the clean-up. If a cleaner leaves a tap running and floods the hallway, we should hold him accountable. But when we see him buying expensive mops to dry the floor, we shouldn’t scream at him for “wasting money on mops.” The OMO expense is the mop. We can be angry that the floor is wet, but we must allow the institution the tools to dry it.
Under Section 3 of the Bank of Ghana Act, the primary objective of the BoG is not to turn a profit or declare dividends. Its absolute, overriding mandate is to “maintain stability in the general level of prices.”
If the BoG operated like a greedy corporation, the “prudent” choice would be to stop the OMOs. The bank would become profitable overnight. But the cost would be apocalyptic. Inflation would skyrocket, and the cost-of-living crisis would crush the working class into the dust.
In a sovereign debt crisis, someone must absorb the shock. By breaking its own balance sheet, the BoG has acted as a shield for the Ghanaian citizen. The GH¢15.6 billion is not “missing”, it is the subsidy that kept the price of your daily bread from spiralling into the stratosphere.
The Central Bank chose to bleed so that the nation wouldn’t haemorrhage. In the grim arithmetic of a crisis, institutional loss is often the only price for national survival.
By Raymond Ablorh
