‘Reduce priority areas of oil revenue use’
Participants in a stakeholders meeting on the use of oil revenue have advocated the narrowing of the priority areas where the revenue can be used.
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They said there must be some specific projects that the revenue from the petroleum sector should be used do that its impact would be felt.
They also called for the labelling of the projects that the revenue was invested in for easy identification.
The meeting was organised by the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) to brief and get feedback from the public on the management of the petroleum revenues in Kumasi last Tuesday.
Stakeholders’ meeting
The meeting was attended by traditional rulers, assembly members, the media, civil society organisations and other interest groups.
According to the speakers, the projects being funded by the revenue were widespread that “it makes the impact of the revenue not being felt or seen.”
They maintained that a narrower focus of the use of the revenue would make more meaningful impact than the current practice where the focus was wide and its impact insignificant.
The participants further demanded that the free education should start from the primary level instead of the current SHS.
They said many parents were unable to afford the education of their children even at the primary level and wondered how those kids would benefit from the free Senior High School (SHS) if they were unable to make it to that level.
They said since the oil revenue was being used to fund the free SHS programme, it should be brought down to the basic level to enable all to benefit from it.
PIAC
Earlier, Mr Affail Monney, a member of PIAC, told the participants that the country raised $3.427 billion from oil from 2011 to 2016.
Out of that amount, he said, the country used $1.473 for Annual Budget Funding and $262.57 million had been saved in the Ghana Heritage Fund.
Although he admitted that the revenue had been used to undertake projects that would inure to the benefit of Ghanaians, he said there was the need to strengthen the monitoring of the use of the revenue to avoid and prevent abuse and corruption.
For instance, he said during monitoring exercises of the committee to the northern part of the country, it discovered that a dam that was supposed to have been built from the revenue was non-existent.
He said it should not take people from Accra to detect some of those anomalies but people on the ground should be able to detect some of those things.