Ghana has not seen a minister resign voluntarily in 30 years of the Fourth Republic, a political analyst says, even as two governments abroad this week fell on accountability grounds.
On June 22, Keir Starmer became the sixth UK Prime Minister to resign outside Downing Street in seven years, stepping down after losing the confidence of a majority of his parliamentary party. Days earlier, on June 16, Equatorial Guinea’s entire cabinet resigned after the vice president declared that the level of target fulfilment had barely reached 10 percent.
Both events fell in the same week that Prof. Baffour Agyemang-Duah, a Ghanaian political analyst, gave an interview warning that political appointments in Ghana are routinely treated as personal financial lifelines rather than national service obligations — a dynamic he argues is actively retarding the country’s development.
Prof. Agyemang-Duah said he could not readily identify a single official in over three decades of the Fourth Republic who had publicly admitted to falling short and resigned on those grounds. The growing public demand for formal Key Performance Indicators for ministers and government appointees reflects deep frustration, he said, but signals that citizens feel presidential discretion over performance is not being exercised with sufficient rigour.
He placed responsibility on both sides of the appointment relationship. Presidents genuinely committed to a national mandate must act decisively when officials fall short. Appointees, equally, must cultivate a culture of honest self assessment that does not wait for external pressure.
“They have the authority to appoint, and they also have the authority to depose,” Prof. Agyemang-Duah said.
The deeper obstacle, he argued, is how many Ghanaians conceive of public office. For a significant number of appointees, the role is not temporary stewardship in service of the public but a primary source of income and security. That framing makes voluntary departure practically unthinkable regardless of performance. The consequences accumulate over four and eight year terms, with officials shielded by political loyalty and ultimately serving out full mandates with little to account for in terms of what they actually delivered.
He drew comparisons from abroad. Japan operates with a political culture in which ministerial scandals routinely produce resignation without the need for external pressure or prolonged public campaigns. The British system exercises an informal but effective compulsion: when a prime minister loses the confidence of a parliamentary majority, departure is expected and a structured transition follows. Starmer’s exit this week, he noted, is exactly this principle operating as designed.
The Central African case is more stark. Equatorial Guinea’s vice president declared the cabinet’s departure in line with the principle that public officials must be held accountable for results, publicly acknowledging that the administration had delivered at barely one tenth of what it committed to. That a government would exit on those explicit terms, and that the head of state would frame the departure as performance-based, reflects a governing expectation Ghana has not replicated at any level of political appointment.
Prof. Agyemang-Duah called for a conscious change in national political culture, anchored in the principle that public office is a trust and not a guaranteed tenure. Officials who cannot deliver, he said, should resign and pursue other work rather than remaining in post and consuming public resources without results.
“It’s a culture we need to encourage,” he said.