In October 2024, five weeks before Ghana’s election, Afrobarometer asked citizens whether the next government, whichever party won, should keep four of the outgoing administration’s flagship initiatives. Eighty-five per cent said yes to Free Senior High School, 81 per cent to Planting for Food and Jobs, 71 per cent to One District, One Factory and 60 per cent to One Village, One Dam. Seventy-nine per cent wanted the electronic transactions levy, the e-levy, scrapped.
Ghana then held one of the continent’s cleanest tests of reform durability. The opposition National Democratic Congress won, and John Mahama returned to the presidency in January 2025. Within seven months, his government had delivered a verdict on each of those programmes. The e-levy was repealed in its first budget. Free SHS was kept and given more money. Planting for Food and Jobs was folded into a new programme with a new name, Feed Ghana. One District, One Factory was cancelled outright. And the 2018 Fiscal Responsibility Act, the previous government’s attempt to bind itself to fiscal discipline, was repealed and replaced by a stricter law.
Public support for the two economic programmes was almost as high as for free schooling, yet they did not survive. That gap answers the question this piece set out to explore. A reform becomes an institution when ending it would impose visible losses on an organised group, when it has its own money and its own bureaucratic home, and when a successor government can take ownership of it without endorsing its rival. Popularity in a survey is not enough.
Four programmes, four fates
The e-levy is the easy case. Introduced in May 2022, it was a 1 per cent charge on electronic transfers above a daily threshold. Afrobarometer’s 2022 survey had found three-quarters of Ghanaians believed it would burden the poor, and three-quarters had little or no confidence that the revenue would fund development. The new finance minister, Cassiel Ato Forson, scrapped it in the March 2025 budget alongside the betting tax, saying both had raised less than expected while worsening the cost of living. Mahama signed the repeal on 2 April 2025. A tax with no beneficiaries anyone could see, and millions of payers who felt it every day, had nothing holding it in place.
Free SHS is the instructive survivor. The National Democratic Congress had criticised how it was designed and funded while in opposition. In government it did not trim the programme. Forson’s first budget instead lifted the cap on the Ghana Education Trust Fund, saying this would make about GH¢4.1 billion available on top of the programme’s GH¢3.5 billion budget for free secondary education and related spending.
Planting for Food and Jobs had near-identical survey support but met a different fate. In April 2025, Mahama launched Feed Ghana as the umbrella under which all agricultural projects would now run. The agriculture minister, Eric Opoku, acknowledged that many officials who had run the old programme were still in place. The function partly continued. The brand did not.
One District, One Factory fared worst. In July 2025, the trade minister, Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare, told Parliament the programme had been cancelled and would be replaced by agro-processing hubs under the government’s 24-hour economy policy.
What protected free schooling
Four features separate Free SHS from the programmes that fell.
The first is a concentrated, visible and recurring constituency. Every household with a child of secondary-school age in every constituency receives the benefit directly, every term. Ending it would mean presenting parents with school fees again. That loss is personal, immediate and easy to blame on whoever imposes it. Planting for Food and Jobs and One District, One Factory spread benefits across farmers, firms and districts in ways most voters could not trace to their own household. Support for them was real but shallow. Support for Free SHS was anchored in family budgets.
The second is money with an address. Free SHS draws on a dedicated stream, the Education Trust Fund, which a new government could expand without inventing a fresh tax. Programmes funded only from discretionary allocations must win their budget every year, and a new administration with its own priorities can starve them quietly.
The third is a bureaucratic home. Free SHS runs through the existing school system, with head teachers, district education offices and a national examination calendar built around it. Dismantling it would mean reorganising a public service. The factory and agricultural programmes ran through secretariats and implementing units closely identified with the previous government, which made them easier to replace with new units carrying a new name.
The fourth is ownership. A new government gains little by abolishing free schooling and a great deal by being seen to fund it better. It can claim the improvement without praising the original author. Feed Ghana and the 24-hour economy hubs show the opposite logic at work: a new president needs his own programmes, and the quickest way to create them is to rename or replace his predecessor’s.
None of this is unique to Ghana. Political scientists who study policy durability, notably Eric Patashnik in Reforms at Risk, have long argued that reforms last when they reshape the interests around them and create groups that would fight their repeal, rather than when they are simply well designed. Ghana’s handover is an unusually clean natural experiment because the survey was taken before the vote and the decisions followed within months.
Rules need an enforcer, not just a law
The Fiscal Responsibility Act tells a subtler story. The previous government passed it in 2018, with a cap on the annual fiscal deficit and a Fiscal Council intended to tie politicians’ hands. The law survived on paper. It did not survive in practice: the deficit cap was suspended during the pandemic in 2020, and Ghana defaulted on most of its external debt at the end of 2022. The advisory council was appointed by the president it was meant to restrain.
The new government’s response was revealing. It did not let the rule lapse. It repealed the 2018 Act and rewrote it into the Public Financial Management (Amendment) Act, 2025, passed in April 2025. The new law sets a debt rule (public debt at 45 per cent of GDP by 2034), a primary-surplus rule of at least 1.5 per cent of GDP a year, and a statutory Fiscal Council that bars members from holding any government position, reports to Parliament’s budget committee and must brief the media at least twice a year. On 8 April 2026, Mahama nominated five members, chaired by Emmanuel Oteng Kumah, a former IMF official, subject to parliamentary approval.
Two lessons follow. A successor government is more likely to keep a rule it can rewrite in its own name, which is why the 2018 law was replaced rather than retained. And a rule becomes an institution only when someone with standing, information and incentive is positioned to call out breaches. The new council is a stronger design than its predecessor, but its powers remain largely advisory and its first members are presidential nominees, one of them a former central bank governor appointed by Mahama in his first term. Its real test will come in Ghana’s next election cycle, when spending pressures have historically peaked.
The pattern beyond Ghana
The same four features help explain durability elsewhere on the continent, with the caveat that each country’s politics differ.
Kenya’s devolution has outlasted three presidents because it was written into the 2010 constitution with a guaranteed minimum share of national revenue, and because it created 47 county governments whose governors, assemblies and staff form a permanent constituency for its survival. Kenya’s Huduma Namba digital identity scheme, by contrast, carried the previous administration’s brand and was replaced by a new scheme under William Ruto’s government. Nigeria’s Petroleum Industry Act of 2021, passed under Muhammadu Buhari, has continued under Bola Tinubu largely because it created regulators with their own staff, revenue and legal mandates, and a host-community funding arrangement with local beneficiaries.
The counterweight matters too. Constituencies can defend bad reforms as well as good ones. A visible, concentrated benefit makes a programme hard to repeal even when it is badly targeted or fiscally costly. Afrobarometer found in 2019 that while 87 per cent of Ghanaians said Free SHS had opened secondary education to many who could not otherwise afford it, opinion was divided on whether it should have been targeted at the poor alone. Durability is not the same as quality. The features that make a reform hard to remove also make it hard to fix.
Who decides what survives
The incentives fall into a recognisable pattern. Incoming governments gain from scrapping unpopular taxes and from renaming programmes they can rebrand; they lose from removing benefits that families feel directly. Ministries and agencies gain when a reform gives them a permanent budget line and lose when programmes run through temporary units. Organised beneficiaries, such as parents, county officials or host communities, are the reform’s real guarantors. Diffuse beneficiaries, however supportive in surveys, rarely defend a programme once a new government offers an alternative. Creditors and the IMF can act as external enforcers of fiscal rules, but their leverage fades once a programme ends, which is why domestic enforcers such as an independent fiscal council matter more over time.
The losers are reforms whose benefits arrive slowly and spread thinly: industrial policy, agricultural productivity schemes, public-sector efficiency drives. These are often the reforms economists value most, and they are the most exposed to political turnover.
Designing for the next government
For reformers, the practical lesson is to design for the successor. That suggests a short set of questions any minister launching a reform should be able to answer.
- Who would lose, visibly, if it ended? If the answer is “nobody in particular”, the reform depends on the current government’s attention.
- Where does the money come from? A protected or dedicated stream outlasts an annual allocation.
- Which permanent institution runs it? A reform housed in a standing ministry or a statutory agency is harder to dismantle than one run by a delivery unit attached to the presidency.
- Can the opposition own it? Cross-party design, neutral branding and broad consultation make it easier for a successor to claim the reform rather than replace it.
- Who has standing to enforce it? For rules, a body that is independent in appointment, funded in law and required to report publicly.
Three scenarios for Ghana’s next test follow from this. If the Fiscal Council is approved, funded and publishes assessments that ministers must answer in Parliament, the 2025 fiscal rules have a chance of surviving the 2028 election and becoming Ghana’s first durable fiscal anchor. If it is approved but kept small, advisory and politically aligned, the rules will survive on paper as the 2018 law did, and be suspended when spending pressure rises. If approval stalls, the rules will depend entirely on IMF supervision and investor sentiment, which fade as the crisis recedes.
What to watch
- Parliament’s approval of the five Fiscal Council nominees and the council’s first published assessment.
- Whether the 2027 budget presentation reports compliance with the 1.5 per cent primary-surplus rule, and how the council responds.
- Free SHS funding in the 2027 budget, and whether any targeting reforms are proposed and survive debate.
- Whether Feed Ghana and the 24-hour economy agro-processing hubs are given statutory or dedicated funding, which would signal that this government is designing its own programmes to outlast it.
- In the run-up to 2028, whether any government proposes suspending or amending the debt and primary-balance rules.
Three questions follow for those who must act. For a reforming minister: if your party loses the next election, who will defend this programme on your behalf? For a donor or development bank funding a reform: are you building an institution with its own constituency, or a project unit that will close with the grant? For an investor reading African reform announcements: is the reform anchored in law, money and a permanent agency, or only in a minister’s speech?
The test of an institution
Governments launch reforms; institutions are what their successors cannot easily undo. Ghana’s handover shows that the difference is built into a reform’s design from the start: in who benefits and how visibly, in how it is funded, in where it sits inside the state, and in whether a rival can take credit for continuing it. The reforms that last are the ones a new government finds cheaper to keep than to kill.