BoG’s 2025 Losses Are Not “The Cost of Stability”, They Are the Cost of Policy Failure
By Dr. Gideon Boako
The 2025 Bank of Ghana financials mark a new low, one that cannot be explained away with the usual political noise as we have seen by the majority’s press conference. Since when did parliamentarians become the spokespersons of an operationally independent central bank? The Bank’s own document shows a staggering operating loss of GH¢15.63 billion, a collapse in negative equity from GH¢58.62 billion to GH¢93.82 billion. This means that the true loss is about GH¢34.1 billion once you account for losses in the Other Comprehensive Income (OCI). These are not rumors; they are the Bank’s own disclosures.
And the most damning part?
2025 was not a crisis year. A Central Bank That Reversed Its Own Recovery The Bank’s 2024 financial statements showed a system slowly healing. Operating losses had narrowed from GH¢13.23 billion to GH¢9.49 billion. Other Comprehensive Income had turned positive. FX valuation losses were moderating. The balance sheet was stabilizing. Then 2025 arrived, and the new management at the Bank of Ghana reversed the progress they inherited.
The question is not whether losses can occur in central banking.
They can. The question is why a central bank that had begun to recover suddenly plunged into the largest non-crisis loss in its history.
Politically Motivated Policy Choices, Not Stability, Drove the Losses
The 2025 report reveals a pattern of avoidable, self-inflicted, and poorly justified decisions:
– Abolishing the dynamic Cash Reserve Ratio, which had been designed to reduce sterilization costs and protect the Bank’s solvency.
– Shifting back to the most expensive liquidity-management tools, ballooning OMO costs even as inflation was already falling. OMO cost ballooning from GH¢ 8.2 billion in 2024 to GH¢16.73 billion in 2025.
– Reversing FX reserve-holding rules in a way that released liquidity straight back to the Bank, only for it to buy it back at high interest through OMO.
– Running gold and FX operations at a structural loss, including a GH¢9 billion loss on the gold purchase programme.
– Selling 18 tonnes of gold reserves, yet still posting a catastrophic loss.
These are not the “costs of stability.” These are the costs of politicizing the policy decisions of the Bank of Ghana.
When Liquidity Management becomes a Transfer Scheme
Published accounts by commercial banks show large profits in 2025, largely because BoG paid them high interest on OMO instruments. In other words:
– BoG booked the losses
– Commercial banks booked the profits
This is not monetary policy. This is a wealth transfer from the public balance sheet to private balance sheets. And it is indefensible. FX and Gold Operations: Losses by Design The Bank buys FX or gold at market rates but values or sells them at an artificially lower oAicial rate. That is not a market failure. That is a policy-manufactured loss, a multiple-currency practice that the IMF itself flags as distortionary. If a central bank bastardizes such a well-thought through operations they inherited from previous administration to ensure it guarantees a loss ab initio, it cannot later claim that the loss was “unavoidable.”
The IMF’s Silence Is Part of the Problem
IMF safeguards assessments are supposed to prevent exactly this kind of quasi-fiscal leakage. Yet the IMF continues to endorse the Bank’s FX intermediation framework while simultaneously warning that the losses are unsustainable.
What is the IMF doing here?
– Waiting for BoG to come back to the IMF again for the 18th time?
– Doesn’t this touch on the credibility of the IMF?
Ghana does not need crisis-management partnership from the IMF. What Ghana needs is to become resilient and rather develop policy-discipline partnership with the IMF.
This Is Not About Politicizing the BoG, It Is About Depoliticizing It
Everything shows that Banks operations are becoming politicized. This is evidence through policy choices that prioritize optics over solvency, and narrative-management over transparency. A central bank that loses GH¢36 billion in a non-crisis year, and would have lost GH¢44 billion without selling gold, cannot credibly claim that it is being “attacked.” It should be answering questions, not deflecting them.
Ghana Needs a Central Bank That Protects the Republic, Not serving a political party agenda
The 2025 BoG financial statement is not just a technical report. It is a confession, one that reveals:
– A central bank that abandoned its own recovery path
– A balance sheet weakened by politically motivated policy decisions
– A liquidity strategy that subsidizes banks instead of stabilizing markets
– FX and gold operations that have been distorted to generate losses
– A governance culture that hides behind politics instead of accountability Ghana deserves better.
Credibility Is a Hard Asset
Credibility, once broken, is expensive to rebuild. But credibility is not rebuilt through press statements by majority caucus in parliament, on behalf of a central bank that has lost its voice. It is rebuilt through discipline, and data-driven and evidence-based policy making. Ghana cannot afford a central bank that treats solvency as optional, transparency as negotiable, and losses as someone else’s problem.
The 2025 “horrible” financial statements are a wake-up call. And Ghanaians must demand answers.
NOTE:
Dr. Gideon Boako, is the Member of Parliament for Tano North and Deputy Member of the Finance Committee of Parliament
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