2027 Budget review: The ten-billion-dollar question for next Thursday

On Thursday, 12 November, the red dispatch box will return to the floor of Parliament for the reading of the 2027 Budget. Ahead of that presentation, consider this a diagnostic preview of the government’s flagship economic pitch. To ground it in hard data rather than political rhetoric, I am prefacing this analysis with a sobering twenty-five-year time series calculated by Professor Fred M Dzanku from Bank of Ghana records. Take a close look at the attached chart before Thursday’s speech begins. For a quarter-century, Ghana has sung the praises of agriculture at every budget reading and campaign rally. Yet over that exact twenty-five-year span, agriculture’s share of formal commercial bank credit has ranged between 3 per cent and 13 per cent, averaging a meagre 5.7 per cent. If agriculture received bank credit matching its weight in our economy, that red line on Professor Dzanku’s chart would sit at 100 per cent. We have never once touched 37 per cent.