03/02/2026
Mr President John Dramani Mahama
You campaigned on a 24-Hour Economy—a promise framed as a structural transformation of Ghana’s production, employment, and export capacity. Yet today, that promise has been reduced to announcements about building 24-hour markets in every district. This raises a fundamental question:
Is Ghana implementing a 24-Hour Economy, or merely constructing 24-hour infrastructure without an economy to sustain it?
A 24-Hour Economy is not defined by markets staying open all night. It is defined by continuous production, efficient logistics, competitive energy costs, strong labour protections, and sustained demand. On these fundamentals, your government has provided no clear implementation framework.
Mr President, businesses do not operate 24 hours because government desires it. They do so when:
Energy is affordable and reliable
Demand justifies additional output
Productivity offsets night-shift costs
Security and transport systems are dependable
Today, Ghana faces high electricity tariffs, unstable power supply, inflationary pressure, weak industrial demand, and overstretched labour enforcement institutions. Under these conditions, forcing or incentivising 24-hour operations raises production costs, compresses margins, and threatens the survival of SMEs, which employ the majority of Ghanaians.
Your administration’s suggestion that shift work will automatically create jobs ignores a basic economic reality:
Firms hire when demand expands, not when operating hours are extended.
Without export growth or increased domestic purchasing power, 24-hour operations risk overworking existing staff rather than creating new employment, ultimately leading to job losses.
The shift from a 24-Hour Economy to 24-Hour Markets further exposes policy confusion. Markets respond to supply and demand; they do not generate them. Building markets without parallel investment in production, cold storage, transport, aggregation, and processing turns an economic reform into a construction exercise—high on visibility, low on impact.
In agriculture, the policy promised to reduce post-harvest losses through 24/7 activity. Yet food waste in Ghana is driven by value-chain failures, not limited operating hours. Without agro-processing capacity, cold chains, and logistics reform, extending market hours achieves nothing. Food waste is a systems problem, not a clock problem.
Finally, Mr President, night-shift economies impose serious labour, health, and security costs. Expanding night work without robust labour inspection, health safeguards, and transport security merely transfers economic risk from the state to workers—undermining long-term productivity and social stability.
Our challenge is simple and direct:
Before announcing 24-hour markets, show the country:
Where energy costs have been reduced
Where demand has expanded
Where productivity has improved
Where labour protections have been strengthened
Where value chains are ready to operate continuously
Until then, the 24-Hour Economy remains a campaign promise searching for economic conditions that do not yet exist.
Ghanaians deserve policy coherence, not policy substitution.
They deserve results, not rebranded announcements.
Public policy must be measured by impact—not by how often it is repeated.
