Online Public Sentiments on Ghana’s Domestic Debt Restructuring Programme and Its Implications for Fiscal Sustainability

Abstract

Experiencing significant financial and balance-of-payments challenges, Ghana embarked on a domestic debt restructuring programme in December 2022 as a means of returning to sustainable debt levels. While the government views the programme as an economic intervention, opponents have conflicting views on such narratives. Considering the unsettled discourse, this study delves into Ghana's domestic debt restructuring programme, using web scraping techniques and Python code to analyse 1,250 comments from X and YouTube platforms from December 5th 2022 to February 28th 2026. The empirical results indicate that “will”, “people” and “Ghana” were the most frequently discussed topics, with more neutral comments overriding negative and positive remarks about the programme. The heatmap also shows that “Debt restructuring”, “Media statements” and “Public accountability” are strongly correlated. For cluster analysis, “Public skepticism” and “Bilateral relations”, “Political accountability” and “Public frustration” are clustered very closely together, suggesting that they have similar sentiment polarities. On the contrary, “Corruption allegations” and “Economic commentary” show a strong pairing, which is later joined by the “Finance minister”. Lastly, “Bilateral relations”, “Corruption allegations” and “Debt restructuring” have a degree of centrality of 78.6% in the ensuing online discourse, which programme implementers should reconsider. It is recommended that the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Ghana should collaborate to implement more robust transparency and accountability mechanisms that provide real-time reporting on government debt transactions.