Tell us how oil money is used — ACEP

The Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) is urging the government and all reporting agencies responsilble for the management of the country’s petroleum revenues to clearly tell Ghanaians how the oil revenue is being used.

The centre explained that three years after drilling oil, these agencies have failed to clearly pinpoint specific projects that had been funded with petroleum revenues for citizens to assess how efficient the government was utilising its oil resources. 

The Executive Director of the ACEP, Dr Mohammed Amin Adam, told the GRAPHIC BUSINESS on August 21 that the government had, to a large extent, complied with the transparency provision of the Petroleum Revenue Management Act (PRMA) 2011 but had not been open about how the revenues were spent.

“The situation we have today is the issue of transparency without accountability; up till now the Auditor General has not issued a report and that is where accountability is,” he said.

He also explained that “when we got oil, Ghanaians were demanding transparency and accountability in the management of oil revenues. The government, to a large extent, has complied with the transparency provision in the law.”

He also added that the other agencies tasked with reporting on the petroleum revenues such as the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) and the Bank of Ghana were also doing well in their reports.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

That notwithstanding, he said transparency alone was not enough to meet the expectations of citizens. 

“We think that merely publishing reports and providing transparency doesn’t satisfy the aspirations of citizens because transparency is not an end in itself; it is a means to accountability. So if we are not getting accountability, which is the other side of the equation, then the value of transparency is challenged,” he explained.

This gap, he said, necessitated the need for the multi-stakeholder forum on accountability reports on the petroleum management revenues.

The forum

The forum brought together representatives from the reporting agencies, civil society, private society and the media.

Dr Amin Adam said the reports that were published did not provide answers and therefore only interactions at such fora would provide the needed explanations.   

“We decided to bring together reporting agencies and citizens to interact among themselves and for the reporting agencies to report to us on the data we have received from them. We ask them questions and they provide the answers,” he said.

The Chairman of PIAC, Major Daniel Sowah Ablorh-Quarcoo (rtd), said PIAC was established with the mandate to monitor compliance with the PRMA Act and also provide an independent assessment on the management and use of oil revenues.

He said the committee had so far complied with all the reporting requirements under the Act, but called on benevolent agencies to help them acquire a permanent place of operation.

He also bemoaned the funding challenges the committee had had to deal with since its inception; something which had impeded some of its operations. GB