Dr Gideon Boako, MP for Tano North, has rejected claims that Ghana’s previous government did not operate under an IMF-imposed limit on foreign-exchange intervention, saying the $80 million monthly ceiling was later reduced to $60 million.
The dispute centres on a $3 billion foreign-exchange sales figure included in the IMF ECF 4th Review Report. Some government and NDC communicators have used that figure to argue that the Bank of Ghana sold an average of about $250 million in foreign exchange each month, making an $80 million intervention cap impossible.
Dr Boako said that conclusion confuses separate Bank of Ghana operations and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of monetary policy and IMF programme negotiations.
According to him, the IMF and Bank of Ghana agreed a strict monthly budget for direct FX intervention as part of measures to rebuild Ghana’s international reserves to specified thresholds. That budget initially allowed intervention of up to $80 million per month before being reduced to $60 million.
He said the previous government complied with the restriction, and that adherence helped Ghana exceed its IMF reserve accumulation target by the end of 2024.
That stronger-than-required reserve performance, Dr Boako argued, gave the IMF confidence to relax the restriction and permit the current government to intervene above the earlier $80 million and $60 million thresholds.
He also said the intervention limit would not necessarily appear in the IMF’s published documents because such details are considered sensitive to financial markets.
“If the market were to know that the central bank could not intervene beyond $80 million, it would create speculative attacks against the cedi,” he said.
Dr Boako explained that figures of this kind are therefore removed from documents submitted to the IMF Board before staff reports are published. The fact that the ceiling is not explicitly identified in the publicly available report, he said, should not be taken as evidence that no agreement existed.
The former government’s foreign-exchange operations also included an FX Auction budget, which was separate from the direct FX Intervention budget.
FX Auctions are announced in advance and operate under established rules, while FX Intervention is discretionary and intended to reduce excessive volatility in the market. Dr Boako said combining the two categories produces the total foreign-exchange sales figure reported in IMF documents.
He said the $3 billion figure cited by critics represents the combined value of those operations, rather than intervention alone. Dividing the total by 12 months and presenting the result as proof that the intervention budget averaged $250 million per month was therefore incorrect.
Dr Boako added that more recent IMF reports identify a third category, known as the intermediation budget. The total reported foreign-exchange sales figure is produced by adding the FX Auction, FX Intervention and, more recently, intermediation operations.
He maintained that the existence of a wider aggregate sales figure does not disprove the separate monthly ceiling governing direct intervention under the IMF programme.
