Gov’t pledges transparency in oil money spending

A Deputy Finance Minister, Mrs Mona Quartey, has repeated the government’s commitment to ensure transparency in the spending of the country’s oil and gas revenue to propel the growth of the economy. It will also use the funds to fight poverty.

She indicated that the government would do everything within its power to make the extractive industry more beneficial to the people.

She said this in a speech read on her behalf at a two-day dissemination workshop of the 2014 Ghana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (GHEITI) reports for the mining and oil/gas sectors of the economy in Obuasi.

It brought together stakeholders including civil society organisations, Municipal and District Chief Executives, District Coordinating Directors, finance officers and chiefs to discuss the findings and recommendations of the report.

Mrs Quartey underlined the critical importance of the natural resource sector to the nation’s development agenda, saying, “it has remained the most important and significant sector of the Ghanaian economy”.

She noted that mining for example contributed eight per cent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 34.7 per cent to the total merchandise export, in 2014.

The sector’s contribution to government’s revenue during the period stood at 5.0 per cent, she added.

She said it was against this background that “for us as a country, we belief that the extractive industry transparency initiative (EITI) process is here to serve the interest of the government, private companies and other relevant stakeholders as it helped to identify the challenges in the sector and how to address them”.