The 2026 Mid-Year Fiscal Policy Review counts things. It counts 24,000 pieces of medical equipment distributed to clinics. It counts 1,840 tractors, ploughs and harvesters procured through an escrow account at the Bank of Ghana.
It counts three cardiology centres now rising at Korle Bu, Komfo Anokye and Tamale. Then search the same 107 pages for the word textbook, or kindergarten, or desk, or E-Block, and the document falls silent. Every one of those was promised, in numbered detail, in the Budget that Parliament passed eight months ago.
The silence has a cost, and it is not a theoretical one. Free secondary education opened the school gate to a generation that would otherwise have stopped at fifteen, and enrolment has since risen faster than classrooms could be built to hold it. That is why, by September 2024, Government had recorded 1,084 emergency senior high school projects across all sixteen regions.
The World Bank now projects a shortfall of more than 850,000 places in Ghana’s public secondary schools by 2040. Every party in Parliament accepts that this pressure must be relieved, and every party has promised buildings to relieve it. The 2026 Budget was this Government’s answer, and it was specific to the last kindergarten and the last desk.
The mid-year statement answers with a list of payments. That substitution is the core argument of this op-ed. Government has told Parliament, in impressive detail, how much money left the centre.
It has not told Parliament what the money bought. The distinction is not pedantry, and it is non-partisan. A disbursement is a promise that a classroom will exist.
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