Compliance Without Preservation traces why, from the statutes and budget documents themselves, and proposes four changes ordered by what each one needs in order to work.
Valen Cole, September 2026. About 9,200 words. 52 sources, cited across 60 endnotes.
Road money flows through two parallel channels: the Ministry's annual budget and a ring-fenced Road Fund financed by a fuel levy. The 2025 Act requires the Fund to put at least 90% of its revenue into "routine, periodic and emergency maintenance and rehabilitation". Ask the two pots two different questions and watch the same numbers change meaning.
2025 appropriation, GH¢3,244,979,701. No statutory floor applies here.
Revenue GH¢3.1 billion (2026). Section 31(1) floor: at least 90% to maintenance and rehabilitation.
The Act already draws the line it needs. Section 30 classifies maintenance into four categories and section 55 defines rehabilitation as restoring a road that has already deteriorated, expressly excluding routine and periodic work. Section 31(1), the only binding allocation rule, then pools all of them into one floor. A fund can put the entire protected 90% into repairing failed roads, nothing into preserving sound ones, and remain fully compliant. Whether the RMTF has done so cannot be determined: the split inside that GH¢2.8 billion is not published. The Act requires reporting against the 90% aggregate and not against the four categories it separately defines in section 30(1), so the statutory test does not generate the number that would answer the question. That is a design feature of the floor, not an omission in the reporting.
Arrears do not arise inside the Fund. They arise on the construction side and are settled from it. Select any step to see the evidence behind it.
What this memo can document is a failure of drafting. Four instruments, the maintenance floor, the performance-contracting mandate, the arrears duty and the levy, are each written loosely enough that full compliance is compatible with continued deterioration.
Construction commitments outrun cash. Certified work becomes arrears, arrears are settled from the ring-fenced maintenance revenue because it is the most liquid pool available, preservation absorbs whatever is left, roads fail early, and rehabilitation is booked as construction. Each step is consistent with the statute as drafted.
3.4×
Outstanding contractor liabilities of GH¢10.5 billion against GH¢3.1 billion of annual Fund revenue, at end-June 2026.
GH¢122.8m
The entire 2025 appropriation for routine and periodic maintenance: less than five kilometers of Big Push road at the lowest reported award rate. An earlier version quoted a GH¢150m funding-gap estimate; it is withdrawn, because it combined two channels that published reporting does not consolidate.
The first needs only the Minister. The second needs one clause. Neither needs new revenue.
Section 57(3) already requires a phased schedule approved by the Minister. On a principal-only illustration, even a five-year clearance leaves more for current work than was spent in 2024.
Amend section 31(1) to set a distinct floor for routine and periodic maintenance, separate from rehabilitation. The Act has the vocabulary and does not use it.
GH¢0.48 per liter since August 2019. Ghana's consumer price index stood at 278.45 that year and 855.78 in 2025. The levy has moved twice in nineteen years, both times inside a larger bill.
The Act says "prioritise" and sets no percentage, timetable or consequence. Ghana has already piloted the model on about 1,052 km.
The argument rests on primary sources and arithmetic that anyone can re-run. Before publication it was tested for the ways it could be wrong.
52 sources
Seven statutes read in the original: Acts 536, 899, 921, 997, 1135, 1141 and 1147. Budget tables from the 2025 Programme-Based Budget Estimates. Named officials, dated statements. Five peer-reviewed studies of Ghana's road sector located through the University of Utah library catalog; the World Bank's 2011 country diagnostic; the Auditor-General's 2019 road audits; the Public Procurement Authority's standard contract conditions. Cited across 60 endnotes — eleven works appear in more than one.
Every figure recomputed
All shares, per-kilometer costs and payoff scenarios were reproduced from the raw cedi amounts. They reconcile to the cedi.
Corrected in the open
Pre-publication stress tests by three other models caught a wrong month, a mis-rounded share and an unsourced comparator. A later review found more: a condition figure taken from an incompatible series, a misattributed parliamentary committee, and a conclusion that claimed more than the evidence supports. All were corrected in the published version. A reader's review in September 2026 pointed out that the memo did not engage prior studies of the sector; a library catalog search followed, and sections 1.3 and 2.7 were added from what it found.
This memo is built on primary sources — Ghana's statutes, the Ministry of Roads and Highways' budget estimates, parliamentary reporting, and the Auditor-General's 2006 performance audit — together with fieldwork in Eastern Region in June 2026. Prior studies of the sector (section 1.3) were located by a manual search of the University of Utah library catalog in September 2026, after the memo was first published and in response to a reader's review; one further study was reached by following a citation in another to its reference list. Six sources were retrieved; five are discussed in section 1.3, and one, on power-sector public-private partnerships, was set aside as off-sector. Two models, Claude and GPT-6 Astra, read the retrieved sources in full and reported on them, and located the primary documents added in this revision — the contract conditions, the Auditor-General's 2019 audits, the Road Fund inflow series, the survey results and the evaluation of the Fufulso–Sawla road. I checked every passage cited against the source at the page given. The catalog search, the choice of what to use, and the editorial decisions were mine. Claude (Anthropic) was used throughout as a research and drafting collaborator: locating and reading primary documents, working through statutory text, checking arithmetic, and producing draft prose to my direction. Three further models cross-checked the finished draft for factual accuracy before publication. The thesis, the fieldwork, the source selection and the editorial judgement are mine, as are any remaining errors.
Reaching communities in Asuogyaman District, where the Volta Lake divides the district in two, took two hours from Kpong to cover under twenty kilometers of separation. The health outreach I was traveling with existed on the premise that this difficulty deterred people from seeking treatment. Excursions were ended at the first rain, because the return could not be relied on afterwards.
Field notes, Eastern Region, June 2026. From section 1.2 of the memo.
The full memo runs six sections plus limitations, an annex on the 2006 Auditor-General's audit that found the same pattern under the previous statute, and 60 endnotes. The web version has clickable footnotes; the PDF is the same text laid out for print.
Figures are in Ghana cedis throughout because the argument concerns the erosion of a nominal cedi amount. Condition data and allocation figures are the Ministry's own; the memo's limitations section explains what that does and does not permit.