Opinions of Wednesday, 20 December 2006
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
The Joke Is On The NDC
A December 15, 2006 news article which appeared on the website of the Ghanaian Statesman had the Provisional National Democratic Congress’ point-man on energy issues in the Ghanaian Parliament accusing the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) of hiding revenue from oil mining activities in the Saltpond area of the Central Region of the country.
It may, here, be recalled that Ghanaians first learned of the presence of oil on our continental shelf during the 1970s, about the same period that the Nigerian oil industry made Ghana’s eastern neighbor the epicenter of commercial activities in the West African sub-region. At that time, the Acheampong regime was even being unofficially accused – largely via rumors – of having accepted kickbacks from the Nigerian government and thus ensuring that Ghana would not disturb the smooth operation of the Nigerian oil industry. Legend also had it that Ghana’s purported oil reserves lay upstream of Nigeria’s and thus any attempt at commercial prospecting on the part of the former would, almost immediately, doom the possibility of the latter continuing to derive substantial revenues from its oil reserves.
And then during the Limann era, Ghanaians even heard of a Canadian-based oil company called Agripetco – or some such phenomenon – which had been invited by the then-government to prospect for oil in the Saltpond area; offshore, that is. Here again, legend had it that the Ghanaian variety of oil was far richer than that which was being mined in Nigeria, in that the Ghanaian variety was capable of generating eleven byproducts, whereas its Nigerian variety could only generate six byproducts. Nobody bothered to explain to the public exactly what these eleven byproducts were. And this did not, in the least, seem to matter, for we were simply too elated to have time to reason along those “nitpicky” lines.
We were elated because, in the case of yours truly, all our best teachers appeared to be leaving in droves for Nigeria and other proverbial “greener pastures,” and there did not readily appear to be any end in sight to such academically fatal hemorrhage. Matters, as was to be expected, soon came to a head vis-à-vis Ghana’s academic crisis, when educational administrators, most of whom had not wielded a piece of chalk for nearly two decades, were suddenly thrust in front of blackboards; and for the very first time since the two countries began taking high-school exit examinations together, under the auspices of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), Nigeria handily vanquished Ghana at all levels and in almost every academic subject! That was in 1982. And so the history of oil, the extractive availability of it, that is, has had a profound impact on Ghanaian education and culture, in general, going back nearly three decades now.
And so when Mr. Moses Asaga, the P/NDC’s ranking member on energy in the Ghanaian Parliament accuses the Kufuor government of “hiding” something called “oil royalties” from the Ghanaian public, the accusation must be accorded the utmost seriousness that it deserves. For instance, according to The Statesman article, bylined Mary Morgan, “Over 600 barrels of oil have been produced at the offshore site [at Saltpond] every day since July 2004, in a joint operation between the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation and Lushann Eternit Energy Limited, an American-owned company.” We are also informed that the Ghanaian government takes in a piddling 3-percent royalty on every barrel of oil sold. And by the calculation of Mr. Asaga, “If 700 barrels of oil have been produced daily since July 2004, there is $ 10.9 million in potential revenue which should have been coming back [sic] to Government. But where is this accounted for?” The allusion here, of course, is to the latest budgetary measures promulgated by the Kufuor administration.
Good question, except that the P/NDC’s Mr. Moses Asaga deliberately fails to point out to readers that it was the erstwhile government of the so-called National Democratic Congress that originally invited Lushann Eternit Energy Limited, the prospecting American oil company, to Ghana, only to sign an “agreement” with Lushann under which “the Government of Ghana had [or received] nothing, there was no royalty agreement, there was nothing in it.” At this juncture, need anybody have to urge the NPP government to “look into” Mr. Rawlings’ frequent trips to the United States during the last couple of years? In sum, what reporter Mary Morgan is telling the Ghanaian public is that the erstwhile P/NDC government entered into an agreement with an American oil company to extract oil from Ghana’s continental shelf at Saltpond, in exchange for which the government and people of Ghana were to receive nothing! This is what might be aptly termed as “rape” in medical parlance. Except that in this peculiarly Ghanaian instance, the “rape victim” actually went out and aggressively solicited the prospective rapist – no pun intended, of course – and apparently got royally raped!
If the preceding fairly accurately captures the scenario, then the most logical conclusion to reach is that the rape victim, at the time of the latter’s aggressive solicitation of the crime, of which the “victim” now blames a third party who was not even present at the time, or moment, of commission of the original crime was, perhaps, either clinically demented or congenitally so. Or, perhaps, the rape victim was so daft and sexually famished as to unreservedly deem this flagrant breach of her humanity to be an irresistible economic favor. The foregoing largely explains why once the third party insisted on getting paid before the excruciating act of rape was “re-committed,” or more aptly “re-perpetrated,” and actually succeeded in getting paid, albeit an insultingly piddling payment it was, the original rape victim, realizing her morbid stupidity, rather than congratulate the relatively shrewder third party, threatened to announce to a full-court town-meeting that the “impudent” third party had actually taken money from the would-be rapist before consenting to be raped.
In sum, while one may unreservedly concur with the P/NDC’s Mr. Asaga that every dime of “royalty” accruing from the Government’s deal with Lushann Eternit ought to be accounted for, the far more significant question becomes: Just how do we, the Ghanaian people, get those who played Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, with our natural and national resources to pay up, big time?!!!
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
