That is how far below target the latest Treasury bill auction came in, the fourth consecutive week of undersubscription after 15 weeks of consistent oversubscription through mid-March.
The government set a target of GH¢7.57 billion. Total bids came to GH¢5.34 billion. It accepted GH¢5.11 billion.
The 91-day bill attracted GH¢4.43 billion in bids — 83% of the total — confirming that investors remain clustered at the shortest end. The 364-day bill received GH¢348.94 million in bids but the government accepted only GH¢162.59 million, rejecting more than half, likely because the yields demanded were higher than it was willing to pay.
Rates ticked up across all three tenors.
The 91-day moved to 4.91%, up 10 basis points. The 182-day to 6.77%, up 6. The 364-day to 9.97%, up 13 and approaching the psychologically significant 10 percent mark.
What has changed in four weeks
In January 2026, the government raised GH¢44.25 billion through T-bill auctions against a GH¢31.54 billion target — 40 percent more than planned. Oversubscription ran for 15 consecutive weeks. The 91-day rate sat at 4.71%. The market was flooded with demand for government paper.
The first miss came on 19 March: a 25.5% undersubscription that ended the streak. Three things shifted simultaneously.
The Bank of Ghana raised rates on its own bills, creating a higher-yielding competing instrument. Institutional investors moved toward these BoG bills and toward fixed deposits and repos rather than settling for government T-bills at sub-5 percent.
The 7-year bond — Ghana's first domestic bond since the DDEP moratorium expired — launched on 30 March with a 12.5 percent coupon and drew GH¢3.1 billion in bids. For pension funds and insurance companies with long-duration liabilities, a 12.5 percent 7-year instrument is more attractive than rolling 91-day paper at 4.91 percent. That GH¢2.7 billion absorbed by the bond would have partly flowed into T-bills.
And the BoG's open market operations are sterilising liquidity, reducing the overall pool available for auctions.
The spread that cannot hold
The 91-day rate at 4.91 percent sits 909 basis points below the 14 percent policy rate. That is an extreme inversion. It was sustainable when excess liquidity kept demand high and the government was the only game in town for short-term domestic paper. Now that competing instruments exist — BoG bills, the 7-year bond, repos — the gap is being forced wider. Rates will continue climbing until the spread narrows enough to draw investors back.
The government plans to raise GH¢15.2 billion from the domestic market between March and June. The 2026 budget carries a zero Bank of Ghana financing policy — all deficit funding must come through market instruments.
Four weeks of undersubscription means the Treasury is consistently raising less than it needs. The choices are familiar: raise rates and increase debt servicing costs, increase the borrowing target and add rollover risk, or compress expenditure and test the IMF programme targets.
