Policy analyst and IMANI Africa Vice President Bright Simons has challenged the accuracy of the State Interests and Governance Authority’s (SIGA) reported GH¢19.8 billion net profit by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in 2025, arguing that the figures do not provide an accurate picture of the sector’s underlying financial performance.
SIGA’s 2025 State Ownership Report described the results as a major financial turnaround, with state-owned and controlled enterprises moving from a net loss of GH¢2.26 billion in 2024 to a net profit of GH¢19.80 billion in 2025.
However, Mr Simons said his analysis of the SIGA report showed that the reported turnaround was significantly influenced by currency effects and inconsistencies in historical financial data.
“We were all there when SIGA, an agency that regulates state-owned or controlled businesses and parastatals, came and told us that state-controlled businesses have made incredible profits in 2025,” he said.
“This was presented as a massive turnaround after years of losses. Someone seemed to have forgotten that Ghana still has nerdy policy analysts who spend their lunch time poring over figures.”
Mr Simons said that after reviewing the report using data-analysis tools, he found that “it simply doesn’t hold up,” adding that the document was “replete with bizarre errors, misstatements, confusions, and flawed inferences.”
According to him, removing currency revaluation effects gives a different picture of the sector’s performance. He said underlying net profit fell from GH¢9.75 billion in 2024 to GH¢8.08 billion in 2025, representing a 17.1 per cent decline.
He added that operating profit declined by 22.7 per cent, while the operating margin narrowed by 3.5 percentage points between the two years.
“In simple terms: SIGA told us that a loss of GHS 2.26 billion in 2024 switched into a profit of GHS19.80 billion in 2025.”
“But as everyone now knows, if you ignore the currency revaluations, profit actually fell from GHS9.75 billion to GHS8.08 billion, a decline of 17.1 per cent,” Mr Simons argued.
He also questioned the reported 976 per cent improvement in profitability, describing the comparison as “totally meaningless” because percentage changes cannot be meaningfully applied when results move from a negative figure to a positive one.
Mr Simons further cited inconsistencies in SIGA’s historical figures. He said the net loss for 2023 had been reported as GH¢2.57 billion in the 2023 report, GH¢7.14 billion in the 2024 report and GH¢6.82 billion in the 2025 report.
He also pointed to differing figures for the 2022 net loss, 2021 revenue and total liabilities, saying the discrepancies made it difficult to conduct reliable year-on-year comparisons.
On efficiency, he alleged that SIGA’s published 2021 cost figure was overstated by GH¢50.9 billion, with GH¢104.97 billion used instead of GH¢54.04 billion.
