CHRISTMAS hampers must not be dished out this year by government departments at taxpayers’ expense. That was the nub of a suitably puritanical edict issued recently by the office of President John Mahama. Belt-tightening is—or at least should be—the order of the day.

Ghana is still west Africa’s biggest economic and political success. But several recent figures are sobering. Inflation is soaring above 13%. The budget deficit widened fast last year, from 4% to nearly 12% of GDP, partly due to a splurge in spending by the government in the run-up to the presidential and general elections of December 2012, which Mr Mahama’s National Democratic Congress narrowly won. Steep rises in the price of electricity and water, both in erratic supply, plus increases in food costs, have shrunk the real value of wages. The local currency, the cedi, has continued to slide, halving in value against the dollar since 2008. The price of gold, Ghana’s most valuable export, has been dropping. Cocoa has missed its production target.

Though oil is beginning to flow in greater quantities from newly exploited offshore fields and the economy is predicted to grow this year by 7%, following 8% in 2012 and a record-breaking 14% in 2011, Ghanaians are feeling the pinch. A good third of them still live on less than $2 a day. The urban minimum daily wage is a meagre $2.25. Yet Mr Mahama may have to squeeze people even harder, in the short run, if he is to keep the economy afloat.

He has a fair chance of doing so, but needs to move faster than he, and especially some of the party populists and crony capitalists around him, would like. Largely because his predecessor, John Atta Mills, had long been ailing before he died in office in July 2012, a sense of drift had set in. Then, after Mr Mahama won the election, by a margin of only 325,000 votes out of 11m, the Supreme Court took until August this year to uphold the original result. That prolonged a sense of national unease that rattled investors and hobbled Mr Mahama’s new government.

Drastically raising prices for electricity and water was a bold new start, though Mr Mahama then had to backtrack quite a lot in the face of trade union wrath. Partly due to a restructuring of salary scales, public-sector wages have been gobbling up 70% of the national budget. Seth Terkper, a canny technocrat who became finance minister this year, so far proposes to thin the civil service only by “natural attrition” as people retire. Moreover, he worries that if wages do not keep pace with inflation, still more nurses and teachers will head off for places such as Britain.

Improving tax collection and widening the tax base are both vital. As a start, a biometric national identification programme is under way. Most people in Accra, the sprawling capital on the coast that is a magnet drawing in perhaps 4m of the country’s 25m people, live in dwellings without proper addresses—with no street names, let alone numbers. Despite Ghana’s bouncy growth, vast ranks of the young have no jobs.

Ghana does surprisingly well in the latest corruption-perceptions index of Transparency International, a Berlin-based watchdog, which reckons it is Africa’s seventh-cleanest country. It wins the same rank in Mo Ibrahim’s governance index, which uses a wider range of criteria. But corruption is plainly a worry. Transparency International’s local branch recently cited a poll that found 54% of Ghanaians saying that corruption was rising, especially in the police, political parties and courts.

The murky allocation of government contracts and extravagant overspending by some ministries—that of youth and sports is a recent offender—are blatant symptoms of abuse. A row over the sale of a troubled local bank involves one of Mr Mahama’s brothers. The front page of a pro-opposition newspaper, the Daily Guide, gave twice as much prominence to this brewing Ghanaian scandal as to the news of Nelson Mandela’s death.

Mr Mahama, who published a thoughtful autobiography before his election, lists the salient issues facing his country with candour, conviction and charm. His biggest challenge, he admits, is “to change the attitude of people, to give them back optimism—they’ve become too cynical and distrustful of politicians and public servants.” On this front, he has issued a new code of ethics. But civil-society advocates as well as the opposition say he has so far been unable to shake off some of the dodgier people that have been close to power, some since the days of Jerry Rawlings, who ran the show for 19 years until 2000, after coming to power twice in coups.

Ghana has deservedly been hailed as a beacon of democracy in west Africa; Barack Obama noted as much by making it his sole sub-Saharan destination during his first presidential term. The peaceful ejection of ruling parties, in 2000 and again in 2008, set an admirable trend. And the prompt acceptance of the Supreme Court’s verdict on the election in August by the losing candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, whose New Patriotic Party is a bit more free-market and liberal than Mr Mahama’s avowedly “social democratic” lot, was widely lauded as statesmanly.

But electoral and constitutional reform is sorely needed to keep Ghana’s vibrant but messy politics in trim. A lack of limits to campaign finance has encouraged excessive patronage. A freedom of information bill, long-promised but delayed, must enable the ownership of companies and media outfits, among other things, to be aired.

The constitution of 1992, devised under the eye of Mr Rawlings, who in that year duly won the first multiparty elections since 1979, gives too much power to the president and does too little to separate the executive and the courts. And, once in power, the winning candidate and his party have little incentive to change the winner-takes-all system, whereby the civil service is invariably packed with friends.

Unless such shortcomings are tackled, Ghana’s admirable yet fragile democracy may be undermined. Mr Mahama has been skilful, not least in handling his own people and in gently but firmly neutralising Mr Rawlings, who likes to give populist advice from the sidelines of the president’s own party. But now Mr Mahama must prove he has both integrity and courage.