Ghana has spent years trying to convince its citizens that mobile money is safe, convenient, and worth using over cash.
That trust-building project took a significant hit on the evening of May 25, 2026, when millions of MTN subscribers received a text message announcing that moving money from their MoMo wallet to a bank account would soon cost them 0.75% per transaction.
The announcement lasted less than 24 hours before the Bank of Ghana stepped in to suspend it. But the damage — political and reputational — had already been done.
What the Fee Actually Was
MTN Ghana’s message was straightforward: from June 1, 2026, transfers from MoMo wallets to bank accounts would attract a fee of 0.75% per transaction, capped at GHC5.
On paper, a GHC5 cap sounds reasonable for large transfers. In practice, for the millions of Ghanaians who use MoMo as their primary financial tool — sending money to family, paying suppliers, or receiving wages — even a small fee on every wallet-to-bank movement adds friction to transactions that are already central to daily life.
Ghana had 26.7 million active mobile money wallets in 2025, up 13.6% from the previous year. The scale of those this fee would have touched is enormous.
The E-Levy Ghost
The timing could hardly have been more politically charged. Ghana’s E-Levy — a 1.5% tax (later reduced to 1%) on electronic transactions introduced by the NPP government under President Akufo-Addo — was only officially repealed on April 2, 2025, when President John Dramani Mahama signed the Electronic Transfer Levy Repeal Bill into law.
Since its introduction in May 2022, many Ghanaians had decried the E-Levy as an excessive tax burden, and more than three-quarters of the population had favoured discontinuing it. The NDC — now the ruling party — had campaigned loudly against it while in opposition. Abolishing it was among Mahama’s most celebrated early-term acts.
So when a new, structurally similar fee emerged just over a year later, social media drew the obvious comparison. The debate erupted online, with many questioning whether this was a reintroduction of the E-Levy, which had only recently been abolished.
Parliament Condemnation
The political opposition wasted no time. Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin criticised the Bank of Ghana, describing the proposed charge as a disguised return of the repealed Electronic Transfer Levy.
Afenyo-Markin argued that the NDC had strongly opposed the E-Levy while in opposition but was now attempting to impose a similar charge through indirect means, saying: “When they were in opposition, they criticised the E-Levy and promised to abolish it. Ghanaians applauded them. But today, what do we see?”
The Minority accused the governing NDC of attempting to introduce a 0.75% charge on mobile money transactions through the Bank of Ghana and a private sector fintech arrangement, rather than through the formal parliamentary process.
That distinction matters: unlike the Akufo-Addo administration’s E-Levy, which was introduced through the national budget and debated in Parliament, the current arrangement bypassed the legislature entirely — at least according to the opposition.
In a press release issued on Tuesday, May 26, 2026, the Bank of Ghana stated that MMFL (MTN) had been directed to pause the implementation of the proposed 0.75% fee, with the suspension intended to allow for broader consultations on the fee and its potential impact on users and financial inclusion across the country.
What This Is Really About
Currently, there have been no further updates on whether the new transaction fee will go ahead after consultation with the regular.
For the record, the fee does not appear to be a government implementation but rather a decision from MTN to impose the fee.
Strip away the political grandstanding, and a genuine question remains: who should pay for the infrastructure that makes wallet-to-bank interoperability possible?
Banks benefit when customers can move MoMo funds into accounts — it’s essentially free customer acquisition. Telecoms and fintech operators bear the cost of maintaining the pipes.
The fee, in principle, is MTN attempting to recover some of that cost. Whether 0.75% is the right rate or should be structured differently is the kind of question the ongoing stakeholder consultation is supposed to answer.
