Make use of petroleum revenue transparent: Government told
Participants in a roundtable discussion on oil and gas production in Ghana have called on the government to be more transparent in the use of the petroleum revenue to enable the citizens to assess the impact of the sector on them.
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They conceded that while some progress had been made in the attempt to make expenditure from petroleum revenue transparent, detailed information on the various projects that the funds had been used on was unknown to the public.
The provision of such information, the discussants said, would make an impact evaluation of the projects possible to determine their benefit to the people.
The roundtable was organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), in collaboration with the Ghana Oil and Gas Inclusive Growth (GOGIG), in Accra yesterday.
Lack of legislation
Dr John Kwakye, one of the three lead discussants, attributed the lack of transparency in the use of petroleum revenue to the fact that there was no legislation that required the government to do so.
He said the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) had to provide revenue inflows from the oil and gas sector on its website for the public to access.
Dr Kwakye, a senior research fellow of the IEA, also said the budget statement should go beyond just stating the total amount to be used from the Petroleum Fund for projects, and give a breakdown of what those projects were, as well as their exact locations.
Potential risk
He said the country faced the potential risk of petroleum funds being diverted from their core objectives and called on civil society to step up its watchdog role.
He also stressed the need for the government to manage the high expectations of Ghanaians of the benefits from the sector, cautioning that if that was not well done, it could be a recipe for tension and social conflict.
Dr Kwakye said money accruing to the state from the petroleum sector could be below public expectation, for which reason it was pertinent for the Public Interest Accountability Commission (PIAC) to be resourced financially and technically to educate the public on happenings in the sector.
The Director of Special Service at the Petroleum Commission, Mr Kwaku Boateng, said the cumulative effect of the projects being funded with petroleum revenue was not being felt because the money had been spread thinly across a number of projects which had not been completed.
He called for the current system of open-door approach being used by the government in the offer of contracts to be replaced by a competitive bidding system that was more transparent.
Concerning the participation of Ghanaians in the sector, he said the sector currently provided direct employment for 5,600 Ghanaians, representing 75 per cent of all direct employment in the industry.
He observed that the lack of experience on the part of young graduates limited their employability and hinted of an exercise by the commission to recruit about 200 young graduates to work with oil companies for 18 months to enable them to build up experience to make them employable.
At his turn, the Executive Director of the Kumasi Institute of Technology, Energy and Environment (KITE), Mr Ishmael Edjekumhene, stressed that Ghana had not done well in the area of transparency in the oil sector.
For instance, he said, it took the government three years to release the list of projects that the petroleum fund had been used to finance.
“We don’t even know the contract sums and how the contracts were awarded,” he added.
