Mid-Year Review: Eight months on, anti-galamsey budget promises face reality-check

Before dawn breaks in towns and villages across Ghana, thousands of teachers are already awake. Some are marking exercise books under dim light. Others are preparing lesson notes, reviewing students' assignments, or worrying about how to stretch limited resources to meet both professional and family obligations.

When political rivalry grows so fierce that a country's progress is treated as an electoral threat, democracy becomes a relay race in which the baton is passed faithfully from party to party while the nation itself never leaves the starting line. The bill, as always, is sent to ordinary citizens and to generations not yet born.

Imagine a shop owner asking an AI assistant how to attract customers. It suggests reducing prices and spending more on advertising, and the response sounds sensible enough to try. Orders increase, the shop becomes busier and the owner feels encouraged, until the accounts show that less money is left after expenses.

When the Speaker of Parliament of Ghana, Rt. Hon. Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, rose to deliver the keynote address at the 2026 National Summit of the Institute of Public Relations (IPR), Ghana, on October 22, he began with a confession and a promise.

For Ghanaians who have endured costly living conditions, unemployment and years of economic uncertainty, the 2027 Budget must offer more than reassuring statistics. On 12 November 2026, Finance Minister Dr Cassiel Ato Forson is scheduled to present the Government’s next fiscal blueprint to Parliament. Deputy Minister Thomas Nyarko Ampem says it will advance the Reset Agenda through a New Economy programme.

A new phase in Ghana’s AI ambitions October has brought three developments that deserve attention.

Every fishmonger at the Tema fishing harbour can tell you the same story. The canoes go further, stay out longer and come back with less. Premix fuel is costly, the nets are old and the bank will not lend because fishing is "too risky". Meanwhile, Ghana imports fish to feed its own people. This is not a story of an ocean without value. It is a story of an ocean without investment.

In the modern economy, a nation’s energy framework is the foundational blueprint that dictates its capacity to industrialise, feed its population, educate its youth, heal its sick, and compete in the global digital marketplace.