‘Stop GNPC from awarding contracts to foreigners’

The Centre for Democratic Governance (CDD) is pushing for a law that will bar the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) from awarding oil contracts to international oil companies.

According to the CDD, the open door tendering system, which the GNPC currently uses to award contracts, does not benefit the country.

At a workshop for the media on capacity building on oil and gas contracts, a Research Fellow at the CDD, Victor Brobbey said allowing the GNPC to solely vet potential investors in the oil sector hinders transparency.

He said the processes adopted by the GNPC to allocate oil blocks should be changed to compel the corporation to “follow a process that is more opened and more transparent and allow just better outcomes for all concerned.”

He observed that the current process being used the GNPC may have been hastily adopted “when we first discovered oil and the extent of the oil discovery was not at all clear. But today the field is fairly established, and its potential is well known, hence allocating the oil blocks in a manner that doesn’t allow for competitive bidding is today not helpful and quite counterproductive.”

“The way you do that is by competitive tendering, that is the bottom line and not by an open door system of allocating blocks to applicants,” he added.

In a related development, the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), has urged government to facilitate more reforms in the way oil contracts are awarded to make the country a model of good petroleum resource management.

They also called on government to strengthen the country’s anti-corruption agencies to identify, investigate and expose corruption in the emerging oil and gas industry.