“Ghana not benefitting from oil revenues”

Jacob Hobenu, the Founder and Lead Strategist at Ghana Oil Watch, has said Ghana has failed to produce anything significant from revenues generated from the oil sector.

Ghanaians were ecstatic at the discovery of vast oil reserves offshore.

In 2007, there were grand promises not to go the way of the other big African oil producers whose industries quickly became riddled with corruption and whose people remained in poverty.

After four years of commercial oil production, Mr. Hobenu told Kafui Dey, host ofMorning Starr on Starr 103.5FM that unlike other countries, Ghanaians are yet to see any significant development in the country from revenues generated from the sector.

“We are of the opinion that let us earmark petroleum revenues so that we use them for specific projects: specific self-financing projects…so that we can always say that this is the benefit that we receive from [oil] revenue”, Mr. Hobenu said Monday.

He added that: “Currently what we are doing is that we are spreading it over several tiny projects and in a nutshell, we would not be able to see that this is the benefit that we have derived from petroleum revenue”.

“We cannot pinpoint major projects and say that this is one major benefit from over a century of gold mining in this country because it’s being spread over several projects and it is the same mistake we are repeating with the petroleum revenue”.

But President Mahama has told Aljazeera in an interview that it would take time before the oil sector becomes a major contributor to the economy.

“Managing the people’s expectation in respect of entering the oil and gas era is one of the things we need to do, oil and gas sector is not suddenly going to become the major sector in Ghana.

“We still have [other] sectors that traditionally have been the greatest contributor to GDP. Cocoa has been a very reliable sector for Ghana for many years…after that you have gold…one of the top ten exporters of gold, [we] export about a 100 tonnes of gold a year.

“In 2013 oil total contribution to our export revenue was 700 million dollars which is nothing compared to a sector like cocoa which can bring of almost 3 billion dollars”.



Source: Ghana/Starrfmonline.com/103.5FM