Natural Resource survey team has work cut out

The Ministry of Energy and Petroleum will on Monday August 12 convene the first meeting of relevant agencies to begin the knotty task of a comprehensive survey and mapping of key national resources, as directed by President Mahama.

The meeting will develop a “framework” for the exercise, and will among others involve the Energy Ministry as coordinator, the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, the Petroleum Commission, as well as Public Universities which have the know-how.

Chief Director of the Energy Ministry, Prof. Thomas Akabza, told the B&FT that the directive should not have even come from the president, since quantifying the country’s resources is paramount to maximising benefits from them.

“If we were far more proactive than we are, the president should not be the one to request that we take stock of the natural resources that we have; because, you know, the Petroleum Exploration and Production bill is basically requesting that we auction blocks rather than the first-come first-served approach that we had, so as to maximise benefits for the country,” he said.

“You cannot sell something when you do not know what it is. So the president’s directive is basically asking us to at least have a fair idea of what we have in the ground, and then we can proceed from there.”

Prof. Akabza admitted, however, that the task is not an easy one, especially when it comes to deep water.

“The place is vast; there are some places that we do not have the expertise to go into because of the cost involved -- for instance, the deep sea.”

The president’s directive, though, asked that the relevant ministries seek technical support where they may to facilitate the exercise.

Last week, a Deputy Minister of Information, Ibrahim Murtala, told journalists at the Flagstaff House that the president was concerned the nation is not deriving maximum benefits from its natural resources and so ordered the stock-taking.

The survey is to identify the specific locations and quantity of oil, bauxite, diamond and gold deposits in Ghana. The results are expected to put the country in a better stead in negotiating contracts for exploration or extraction of the resources by multinationals.

Globally, an asymmetry or unevenness of information is said to exist between resource-rich countries and bullish multinationals; with more money and technology, multinationals have more information on natural resource accumulations, which puts them in a far stronger negotiating position.

“While the establishment of national oil and mining companies may have largely eliminated the asymmetry of information between international companies and the governments of the resource-rich countries, a different kind of asymmetric information persists.

“The citizens of resource-rich countries have very little information about the extractive industry-related activities in which their governments engage. “Unless the people understand better how much money is flowing and where, the asymmetry will persist. The obvious remedy is greater transparency and accountability,” a book titled Escaping the Resource Curse says.

Speaking before a US Foreign Affairs sub-committee recently, Ghana’s Mohammed Amin Adam, Executive Director of the Africa Centre for Energy Policy, called on the governments of developed countries to help fight Africa’s resource curse.

“The need to implement the extractive industry payment disclosure provisions in the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform Act is long overdue, as citizens of Africa await the disclosure of relevant corporate information that enables them to hold their governments accountable,” Mohammed Amin said.

“The most important risk Ghana faces with oil and minerals is the non-extension of transparency to the whole extractive industries value chain. For both oil and minerals, there is no open tendering or bidding process for acquiring prospecting or exploration rights,” he added.