Ghana aims to avoid the 'oil curse'
President John Kufuor says he will put safeguards in place to ensure that newly discovered oil reserves will not be mismanaged.
from the August 6, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Ghana, where about 40 percent of the population lives on a dollar per day, can ill afford that.
Safeguards to prevent corruption?
The government is scrambling to assure the public that corruption will not taint the fledgling industry and create the type of wealth disparities that have turned swaths of Nigeria into battle zones.
"We have to be careful with this find, and my government will start working immediately to ensure that the safeguards are not political but institutional and benefit the nation as a whole," said Mr. Kufuor.
What Kufuor means by safeguards, according to Deputy Energy Minister K.T. Hammond, is transparency measures to determine who produces the oil, who exports it, and where the money goes.
Mr. Hammond says Kufuor wants to create a system to identify those oil accounts "so that, at any point in time, we know how much money we have from the oil revenue and where that is sitting."
The government, however, has released few details as to how the safeguards would work.
Local activists criticize the government's willingness to tackle corruption, saying Kufuor's declaration of a zero-tolerance policy upon taking office in 2001 hasn't amounted to much.
Nii Moi Thompson, an economist who heads the Development Policy Institute, says the distribution of government money is transparent, but how those funds are used is not.
He says government officials frequently overcharge for projects that only cost a fraction of the bill, pocketing the extra money.
"If we cannot account for $20 million, then how can we account for $20 billion?" Mr. Thompson asks.
He says Ghana should create an oil revenue authority to emphasize autonomy and limit political interference.
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