Former MP and NPP flagbearer hopeful Kennedy Agyapong has pledged to model Ghana’s economic transformation on the so-called Asian Miracle, citing examples from Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Speaking at the 2025 National Emerging Leaders Economic Forum, he argued that government-led industrial support, combined with strict accountability, could drive rapid development if implemented with discipline and performance-based incentives. His vision echoes past development models but also raises questions about whether Ghana’s institutions can deliver the same balance of control and competence.
Agyapong’s proposal, if implemented successfully, would present a fleeting opportunity to transform Ghana’s economic fortunes. His proposal, however, is not alien to rhetoric and policy surrounding economic governance in Ghana. The Asian miracle was characterized not only by government-led industrial support, as argued by Mr. Agyapong, but also by a highly interventionist state role. Kwame Nkrumah’s experiment with such a model in Ghana during the late 1950s and 1960s represented an equally ambitious attempt to rapidly industrialize and modernize the newly independent nation through extensive government involvement in the economy. His vision, influenced by socialist principles and pan-African ideology, aimed to break Ghana’s dependence on cocoa exports and colonial economic structures by utilizing state revenues to develop a diversified, self-sufficient economy. However, the program suffered from mismanagement, corruption, and cost overruns, leading to mounting debt, inflation, and economic stagnation. By 1966, when Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup, Ghana’s economy was in crisis, with many state enterprises operating at a loss and the country burdened with debt. This served as a cautionary tale of overambitious state planning, which nonetheless left a complex legacy of infrastructure development alongside economic dysfunction.
Over the years, we have learned that mismanagement and perpetual subsidization have become endemic features of Ghana’s public enterprises, with profitability and operational efficiency taking a distant backseat. These state-owned entities have proven particularly vulnerable to political patronage, a pattern that persists despite occasional reform efforts. Even the Akufo-Addo administration’s restructuring initiatives under SIGA, which initially kindled some optimism, could be said to have disappointed due to the continued appointment of party loyalists to key management positions of public enterprises. As corruption and mismanagement have characterized successive administrations, the political will to prioritize meritocracy over patronage in public enterprises remains conspicuously absent.
The calculus is stark: when substantial private capital finances political campaigns, the subsequent plundering of state resources becomes almost inevitable. Once elected, candidates reward their benefactors’ loyalty by granting them control of public enterprises. Agyapong, through his recent rhetoric, has demonstrated a clear understanding of the developmental challenges confronting Ghana. However, his capacity to transform public enterprises from a patronage-based system to a merit-driven one faces significant structural constraints, chief among them being the imperative to reward party loyalty and satisfy campaign financiers. Herein lies the fundamental disconnect: while mounting losses at state enterprises have become increasingly intolerable to Ghanaian civil society, the political class has developed an apparent comfort with this status quo. This divergence between public expectation and political accountability represents perhaps the most formidable obstacle to meaningful reform.
The ideal form of the Asian model may not thrive in Ghana’s current socio-political setup. Look closer, and you’ll realize that the state-owned enterprises left untouched by the sweeping privatization drive in the late 1990s have not been significantly profitable in the last three decades, and their operations still suffer from mismanagement, corruption, and cost overruns. The core features of the “East Asian Development Model” which engendered the so-called Asian miracle, include government control of finance, state-backed support for public enterprises, import substitution industrialization, a strong reliance on export markets, and elevated domestic savings rates. While in theory, the government of Ghana could expand its oversight or control over finance to emulate the Asian model, unfortunately, the list of institutional and structural challenges far surpasses the channels of feasibility and effective implementation.
Unlike East Asian states, such as Taiwan and Singapore, which implemented strong, technocratic bureaucracies to guide credit and investment, Ghana’s financial institutions operate within a liberalized framework shaped by IMF and World Bank reforms since the 1980s. This limits direct state intervention. As of October 2025, Ghana remains under an IMF arrangement, and a continuation of this arrangement before or during a potential 2028 administration could significantly hinder any attempt by the state to exert extensive control over finance. We must ask the uncomfortable questions: Could a Kennedy Agyapong administration maintain disciplined fiscal management? Probably not! The constraining fiscal deficits and debt servicing obligations on Ghana, coupled with the apparent need to reward political loyalists, limit the viability and practicality of state industrial financing.
A modern-day import substitution industrialization strategy may require reintroducing tariffs or restrictive trade policies to protect infant or mature domestic industries. This may likely increase production costs, raise consumer prices, and strain relations with key trading partners and multilateral institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. Additionally, energy and logistics costs remain high, and state agencies often lack the technical and managerial capacity to coordinate long-term industrial policy effectively. This has been evident across administrations under the Fourth Republic.
Agyapong’s vision may be implementable during a potential two terms, but the long-term continuity of the policy remains subject to debate. Our electoral cycles, unlike those of East Asian countries when they embarked on their development agendas, are prone to policy discontinuity, and understandably so, when subsequent administrations deviate from Agyapong’s industrial strategy for reasons ranging from an unsupportive economic environment to contrasting ideologies. In the absence of a binding bipartisan industrial strategy, Ghana would merely scratch the surface of problems that demand a comprehensive and fundamental transformation.
A realistic path forward could involve strengthening the State Interests and Governance Authority (SIGA), providing direct but conditional financial assistance to local industries, prioritizing national development over political patronage, and empowering the Special Prosecutor’s Office and relevant agencies to aggressively prosecute financial crimes. Mr. Agyapong argued that “Beneficiaries of soft loans and incentives must deliver results. If they fail, the support—and in some cases the entire enterprise—should be taken away and handed to more competent managers.” To strengthen accountability, repercussions would need to extend beyond mere manager replacements. State investigations would have to be commissioned to determine whether failures stem from corruption, negligence, or malfeasance, and the necessary stringent measures would be applied accordingly. Imposing stringent penalties for willful financial loss to the state is not unprecedented; similar measures were observed during the transformation of East Asian economies, particularly in Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek and Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew.
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