The clock is ticking: Mahama's Ministers have been warned

Let us not be deceived by the packaging.

The circular that landed on the desks of Ministers and Chief Executive Officers of State institutions on Monday was presented as a directive against participation in private award schemes. 

Read it again. 

Buried in paragraph seven, almost as an afterthought, almost as if the Presidency wanted you to miss it, is the sentence that actually matters: the findings of the forthcoming performance review “shall constitute a key basis for decisions relating to retention in office, reassignment of responsibilities, and any future Cabinet or executive restructuring.”

A reshuffle is coming. 

The only question worth asking now is: who survives it?

President Mahama has governed before. He knows that a first term, or in this case, a returning term, has a rhythm. You spend the opening months assembling your team, setting tone, establishing direction. 

Then, somewhere between eighteen months and two years in, you look across the Cabinet table and ask yourself the honest question: are these the right people?

That moment has arrived. This circular is its public announcement.

The award scheme problem is real - But it is not the point

To be fair to the Presidency, the substance of the directive is not without merit. Ghana has developed a peculiar and embarrassing cottage industry of self-styled excellence awards, leadership summits, and recognition ceremonies that target public officials with the precision of a marketing campaign. 

The formula is familiar: design a plaque, rent a hotel ballroom, send an invitation that is really an invoice, and watch ministers queue up to be photographed holding trophies bestowed by organisations nobody has heard of.

It is a vanity economy, and it has flourished because too many officials have confused being seen to perform with actually performing. The Presidency is right to end it.

But that is not why this circular will be remembered. It will be remembered because it placed every member of the executive on formal notice that their time is being measured, their output is being tracked, and their future in government is contingent on what they can show for it.

The benchmark is unforgiving

The standard the Presidency has set is not a vague aspiration. It is the 2024 NDC Manifesto,  a document of specific promises made to specific people. Add to that the sector-level performance indicators agreed with supervising authorities, and you have a framework that leaves very little room for spin.

Some ministers will welcome this. Those who have been quietly delivering, who have kept their heads down, resisted the temptation of the banquet circuit, and pushed policy through the grinding machinery of government, will see the review as vindication. 

Their frustration has always been that the loudest voices in Cabinet are not always the most productive ones. Others will be nervous. And they should be.

I will not play the game of naming names, that is not analysis, it is gossip. But the pattern of who survives a President Mahama reshuffle is not difficult to read.

There is a political calculus. A reshuffle is never purely technocratic. Regional balances, factional loyalties, and the management of internal NDC dynamics all play into the arithmetic. But, and this is the critical shift this circular signals, President Mahama appears to be raising the floor. You may still need political capital to get into Cabinet. You now also need a results file to stay there.

The countdown

The Presidency offered no timeline. “In due course” is the language of governments that want to keep their appointees permanently off-balance, and that is entirely deliberate. 

A minister who does not know when the review lands is a minister who cannot afford to stop working.

That, ultimately, is the purpose of Monday’s circular. It is not about award schemes. It is about power, the President’s power to remind his team, at a moment of his choosing, that no appointment is permanent, no portfolio is guaranteed, and no plaque from a hotel ballroom will save you when the results are in.

It reminds every ambitious minister that the road to 2028, if it runs through this Cabinet, runs first through delivery. Presidential ambition without a results file is not ambition. It is a liability.

The clock is ticking. 

The question is not whether there will be a reshuffle. The question is whether, when it comes, your name is on the right side of the ledger.