On July 30, 2026, the Attorney-General, Dominic Ayine, stood at Jubilee House and delivered what the government called the most significant constitutional reform package in a generation.
Ten headline recommendations. A five-year presidential term. A younger candidate age. Elected district chief executives.
Capped ministries. On paper, a nation modernising itself. In substance, a nation once again mistaking the symptom for the disease.
Too much power
The Constitution Review Committee, chaired by Professor Kwasi Prempeh, did something previous reviews had not quite managed: it named the ailment honestly.
Ghanaians, the Committee found, believe the presidency holds too much power even when they cannot point to the specific article that grants it.
That is not confusion on the citizen’s part.
That is the correct diagnosis of an executive whose authority operates less through written text than through accumulated practice, appointment discretion, and control over the state’s purse.
The Committee heard, too, that citizens feel shortchanged by the nation’s oil and gas wealth, that governments discard their predecessors’ development plans on arrival, and that politics costs too much to attract anyone without money or patronage behind them.
This is, in essence, an accurate clinical picture of the Fourth Republic’s actual disease: a hyper-personalised executive operating inside institutions too thin to discipline it, financing itself through a central bank and a resource base with insufficient constitutional insulation, and governing in four-year sprints with no binding thread from one administration to the next.
Prescription
Then came the prescription. And the prescription treats the fever, not the infection.
Extending the presidential and parliamentary term from four to five years does nothing to constrain what a president does with the time. It simply gives an unconstrained office one additional year of unconstrained operation.
Capping ministers at sixty and Parliament at three hundred addresses headcount, not power, a government can staff a smaller cabinet and still control judicial appointments, state enterprise boards, and fourth-branch institutions with exactly the same discretion it has today.
Electing district chief executives is a genuine decentralisation gain, and should be credited as one. But it does not touch the center. It rearranges furniture on a lower floor while leaving the architecture of the penthouse untouched.
Demi-god behaviour
The Committee itself proposed something with real teeth on the fiscal side: tighter constitutional conditions on when the Bank of Ghana may finance government directly, and a requirement that Parliament enact a binding debt management framework.
These are the closest things in the entire report to an actual constraint on demi-god behaviour because they attack the mechanism, not the title.
A president who cannot compel the central bank to print, and who operates inside a legislated debt ceiling, is a president whose ambitions meet a wall regardless of how popular or forceful he is.
But note the caveat embedded in the Committee’s own proposal: it deliberately declined to fix debt ratios in the Constitution, leaving the actual numbers to ordinary legislation.
Ordinary legislation is not a wall. It is a fence a determined majority in Parliament which in Ghana’s system usually means a determined executive can move whenever convenient. A constraint that can be amended by simple majority is not a constraint. It is a suggestion with a parliamentary letterhead.
One Henry Bruce
And on the resource question the one Henry Bruce and every serious observer of West African political economy keeps returning to.
There is silence. Citizens told the Committee, in plain language, that they do not feel they benefit from their own oil and gas.
Nowhere in the 127-page report, and nowhere in the government’s accepted position, is there a mechanism that changes who actually owns the upside.
No entrenched national equity stake. No binding heritage-fund architecture insulated from budget-cycle raiding.
No structural claim on resource wealth that survives a change of government.
Ghana already has a Heritage Fund and a Stabilisation Fund under the Petroleum Revenue Management Act and Ghana has already watched governments treat both as line items subject to negotiation whenever a fiscal year gets tight.
A constitutional review that identifies resource grievance as a top citizen complaint and then produces zero structural response to it has not reviewed anything. It has taken notes.
Same category of placebo
This is the second time Ghana has run this exact play. In 2011, a Constitutional Review Commission diagnosed the same concentration of presidential appointment power, the same weak National Development Planning Commission, the same absence of cross-administration continuity and in 2012 the government’s White Paper accepted the diagnosis and produced a response too timid to survive contact with the next election cycle.
Fourteen years later, the same disease, named by a different chairman, in a different report, has produced the same category of placebo: procedural adjustments that photograph well and structural constraints that photograph nowhere at all.
Checked Presidency
The honest fix was never a smaller president. Ghana does not need a weak presidency; a weak executive inside weak institutions does not produce accountability, it produces a vacuum that gets filled by whoever controls the party machine off the books.
What Ghana needs is a checked presidency appointment powers subject to real legislative or judicial veto, fiscal discipline entrenched rather than legislated, and a resource-revenue architecture locked into the Constitution itself rather than left to the next budget statement.
Botswana did not build seventy years of stability by weakening its executive. It built it by wrapping that executive in institutions: Debswana, the Pula Fund that constrained how power could be used without pretending the power did not exist.
Ghana has now spent 14 years and two national reviews naming its disease with increasing precision.
What it has not yet done, twice in a row, is write a prescription strong enough to cure it.
