As Ghana navigates one of its most ambitious institutional reform agendas in decades, a proposal by former Power Minister Dr. Kwabena Donkor to manage the merger of two energy regulators through natural attrition rather than forced redundancies is drawing attention beyond the energy sector, raising questions about whether the same framework could guide a broader rationalisation of the country’s public sector architecture.
Dr. Donkor made the argument specifically in the context of the proposed merger of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) and the Energy Commission into a single streamlined regulatory body. Facing pushback from worker unions at both institutions, he counselled the government to hold firm on the reform while managing workforce concerns through retirements, voluntary exits, and staff retraining rather than abrupt job cuts. “When vacancies occur, you don’t necessarily replace,” he said. “Where needed, retrain staff to fill new roles.”
The principle is simple but its potential reach is significant. Ghana’s public sector has accumulated a large number of agencies, commissions, and regulatory bodies over successive administrations, many of which carry overlapping mandates, duplicated administrative structures, and chronic budget pressures. Ghana’s public sector reform initiatives, grouped across four broad phases since 1986, have been largely unable to achieve the desired transformation in institutional performance, with analysts noting they were supply-driven, poorly coordinated, and lacked effective linkages to each other.
President John Dramani Mahama’s administration has already taken initial steps in this direction. The President has noted that government efficiency has improved by reducing the number of ministers and deputies to 58, while digital systems are being deployed to reduce corruption and accelerate public service delivery. The 2026 budget further commits to expenditure rationalisation as a fiscal discipline tool under the country’s evolving relationship with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
But the PURC-Energy Commission merger debate illustrates the political complexity that awaits any deeper rationalisation effort. Union resistance is not irrational. Workers facing institutional mergers have legitimate concerns about job security, seniority structures, pay harmonisation, and career progression. What Dr. Donkor’s attrition model offers is a middle path that could make reform politically survivable without surrendering its economic logic.
Policy analysts have argued that the path forward for Ghana is not to cut jobs or close down institutions recklessly, but to consolidate and rationalize existing structures, noting that a rationalized public service can be leaner but more productive, with existing human resources redeployed to fill functional gaps.
The energy sector is not alone in facing this question. Ghana’s downstream petroleum sector has seen ongoing debates about the rationalisation of Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs). The Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), currently under government review following an emergency Cabinet session in February 2026, faces structural questions about the efficiency of its subsidiary architecture. The country’s financial regulatory space, with the Bank of Ghana (BoG), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the National Insurance Commission (NIC), and the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA) each maintaining separate administrative infrastructure, has similarly attracted long-running academic and policy debate about consolidation potential.
In each of these cases, the Donkor attrition model offers a replicable template: define the merged institution’s target structure, freeze new recruitment in areas of overlap, allow natural turnover to gradually reshape the headcount, and invest in retraining to redirect existing staff toward higher-value roles within the new entity.
The model is not without limitations. Natural attrition is slow, and where reform urgency is high, gradual workforce adjustment may delay the efficiency gains that justify the merger in the first place. There is also a risk that critical technical roles are left vacant for extended periods if retirement outpaces retraining capacity.
Nevertheless, in a political economy where public sector unions carry significant electoral weight, the attrition framework may represent the most realistic pathway to institutional consolidation that successive Ghanaian governments have yet attempted. Whether the Mahama administration chooses to adopt it beyond the energy sector will be one of the defining institutional questions of Ghana’s current reform cycle, and the PURC-Energy Commission merger will serve as the first real test of whether the model can survive contact with organised labour.
