Ghana among nine African countries with natural resource fund

8/10/2010

Story : Musah Yahaya Jafaru
THE 2010 Revenue Watch Index report has rated Ghana among only nine African countries with some form of natural resource fund or account for social development.
The report, however, disclosed that in that group of countries, it is only Nigeria and The Sudan that had made efforts to make transparent the mode of transfer of that revenue.
In the case of Nigeria, it said transfers of mining funds from the Federal Government to local governments had been made transparent in part to defuse political conflict.
The Revenue Watch Index, conducted by the Revenue Watch Institute and Transparency International, evaluated 41 countries with half of the world’s population and are major producers of petroleum, gold, copper and diamond on the availability of information in seven areas of their natural resource management.
Independent consultants gathered the information from November 2009 to April 2010 and concentrated on identifying publicly available information from January 2006 to December 2009.
The Executive Secretary of the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), the local chapter of Transparency International, Mr Vitus Azeem, presented the findings of the report at a press conference in Accra on Wednesday.
On the availability of information, the report named Ghana as one of the five African countries with the least amount of information on the contract and licensing terms of their natural resources.
Tanzania, Algeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea are the other African countries in that category.
The report indicated that despite formal rules giving Parliament the authority to ratify such contracts in Ghana, “public access to the agreements remains limited”.
It said even parliamentarians sometimes complained about delays in making some contracts available to them.
On the environmental and social impact of such activities, however, it said Ghana was one of a few countries that published some reports, with Angola, Tanzania and Zambia also in that category.
The report said sub-Saharan Africa was the region with the largest number of countries carrying out the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) which set standards for companies to publish what they paid and for governments to disclose what they received.
It said Ghana produced two reports on the EITI covering 2004 and 2005 and was yet to finalise the 2006 to 2008 reports for publication.
It revealed that African countries, including Liberia, South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana and Gabon, provided their citizens with information on their revenue from the extractive sector, yet had transparency gaps.
However, it came out that no single African country provided its citizens with substantial amounts of information on revenue from the extractive sector.
The report urged governments to improve contract transparency and impress on companies to disclose detailed production and financial information on oil, gas and mining projects.