Illegal mining, narcotics and economic hardship drove negative sentiment in Ghana’s online political conversation in September 2026, a new IMANI Pulse report has revealed.
Galamsey was the loudest and most negative issue for the month, generating 2,647 mentions with 94 per cent of them negative and a mean sentiment score of -0.72.
Narcotics-related issues also reshaped the conversation in the latter part of September. Cocaine recorded 1,344 mentions with 89 per cent negative, while EOCO had 1,939 mentions with narcotics getting 393 mentions.
On the economy, currency and fuel attracted the highest volumes of discussion with 1,361 and 1,135 mentions respectively. However, cost of living with -0.25, debt and IMF with -0.24 and fuel with -0.23 carried the most negative tone.
The cedi split opinion, with 454 positive and 610 negative mentions, while government’s Big Push infrastructure programme was one of the few issues with clear positive sentiment at +0.28.
“The central challenge is not simply to ask whether Ghana’s online political conversation is positive or negative. It is to ask what is driving the sentiment, whether citizens are debating policies or personalities, and whether moments of intense political attention are translating into meaningful conversations about governance,” IMANI said in its report.
The IMANI Public Understanding and Literacy for Sentiment and Election analysis (PULSE) framework is designed to assess public sentiment across digital and media ecosystems regarding major political contenders, identifying dominant narratives, emerging trends and key influencers shaping online political discourse.
For the September edition, covering 1st to 30th September 2026, the analysis tracked 17,806 public posts across X, Facebook and TikTok, generating 4,838 figure-tagged sentiment readings across seven political figures and tracking 16 keywords.
