The Big Push

Roads, rail and the numbers in dispute

Ghana's government calls its road programme the largest in the sector's history. Here is what is being built, what it costs, and who is questioning the figures.

Words: Onome T, Chief Writer · No photographs shown yet; pending Max's selection from his Accra and Jamestown shoots (The Content Campus)

The Big Push

In his State of the Nation Address on February 27, 2026, President Mahama put numbers on the ground: 50 major road projects, 1,144 kilometres, an estimated cost of GH₵50 billion. He called the Big Push the largest investment in the country's road sector in history. Then he gave the country a line to carry: "the whole of Ghana is going to become a construction site."

That line is both a promise and a forecast. Under it sit roads, an expressway, rail, the airport, the ports and power in Kumasi. Beside them sit the questions that followed: a presidential procurement probe, and the Minority in Parliament asking how the figures add up.

The headline project is the proposed Accra-Kumasi Expressway: 198.7 kilometres, six lanes, designed to bring the trip between the two cities down to about two and a half hours. Finance Minister Ato Forson presented the 2026 Budget on November 13, 2025. He said the new alignment would shorten the route from 250 kilometres and cut travel time by half. He said it was expected to reduce transport costs by nearly 40 per cent and create over 30,000 direct and indirect jobs during construction.

Proposed is the honest word. The road is to run under a concession of up to 50 years. When the President spoke in February, feasibility studies and detailed designs were still under way. The expressway has a length, a lane count and a promised time saving. At the time of the address, it did not yet have a finished design.

The money set aside is large and specific. The 2026 Budget allocated GH₵30 billion to the Big Push Infrastructure Programme. It also set aside GH₵828 million for 1,000 kilometres of agricultural enclave roads. On July 23, 2026, Forson presented the Mid-Year Budget Review. He told Parliament that work had started on 87 Big Push projects: 74 trunk roads and bridges, 10 urban roads and 3 feeder roads.

Fifty projects in February. Eighty-seven in July. A presidential probe counted 140 contracts awarded. Each number belongs to the statement it came from; they count different things at different moments.

Roads are the loudest part of the plan, but they are not the only part. Government has procured 300 buses for Intercity STC Coaches, Metro Mass Transit and private operators. At Accra International Airport, Terminal 2 is to be remodelled into a domestic and international facility with a new concourse and a seven-storey car park. The President said passenger traffic handled by the Ghana Airports Company rose to 3.625 million in 2025, up from 3.4 million in 2024. At Tema Port, a 24-hour operational system has started. Cabinet has reviewed feasibility studies for a proposed port at Keta. The President also said the Ministry of Roads has approval to bring back road tolls, collected with technology meant "to enhance transparency and reduce revenue leakages," with operations expected to resume in 2026.

Kumasi, at the far end of that expressway, is also where the energy plans gather. On May 8, 2026, Energy Minister John Abdulai Jinapor put it plainly: "Very soon, we are going to have more than 1,000 megawatts situated here in Kumasi." The projects he named are the 350-megawatt AKSA plant, the 110-megawatt CENIT facility, the 250-megawatt AMERI plant and the 380-megawatt ARVENSIS project.

Spending on this scale draws questions, and Ghana's press asked them. Investigations by the Media Foundation for West Africa and the Fourth Estate alleged abuse of single-sourcing in Big Push contracts. Those reports triggered a presidential investigation led by Dr Valerie Esther Sawyerr. According to the Daily Graphic, it found that the Ministry of Roads and Highways did not breach any procurement rules.

The report breaks down the 140 Big Push contracts. Sixty-six were single-sourced, 51 went through restricted tendering, and 23 were legacy projects inherited from the previous administration. It put single-sourced Big Push contracts at about 4.58 per cent of all road contract awards by the ministry. The President accepted four reforms. One requires single-source contracts above a set threshold to obtain a Value for Money Certificate from a newly established Value for Money Office.

The Minority in Parliament challenged the arithmetic. In its response to the 2026 Budget, it said Parliament approved capital spending equal to 1.5 per cent of GDP, and that the government had implemented only about 0.5 per cent year-to-date. It said the Big Push had been promised GH₵13 billion for 2025 but had, by July, been issued commitment authorisation of only GH₵7.6 billion.

The Minority also quoted the Budget Statement, which said the GH₵63 billion in road contracts awarded so far would generate an estimated 490,000 jobs. Its question was direct: "How is the government able to award road contracts under the Big Push amounting to GHS63 billion, when the total allocation for 2025 was GHS13 billion?" The government's case sits in its own record: the February address, the July review and the Sawyerr report.

Rail is the slowest-moving part of the record. The 97.7-kilometre Tema-Mpakadan line cost US$447 million, financed through a credit facility from the India Export-Import Bank. It was officially opened on November 22, 2024. Six months later, Graphic Online reported, the service was still inactive. Dr Frederick Appoh, acting chief executive of the Ghana Railway Development Authority, said theft and vandalism had held back the start of operations. He said full commercial operations could begin by June 20, 2026.

In his February address, the President listed operationalising the Tema-Mpakadan line as rail work that continues, alongside upgrades to the western and eastern corridors.

“The whole of Ghana is going to become a construction site.”

Sources

The Big Push

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