BudgiT Ghana, has reiterated calls for the review of the oversight responsibility of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) to include revenues obtained from mineral resource production in the country.
The call made by BudgiT Ghana, follows the Committee’s commendable role of ensuring transparency and accountability in the management and use of petroleum revenues for the past decade.
Unlike the oil and gas sector that is governed by the Petroleum Revenue Management Act, 2011 (Act 815), which guides the spending of petroleum revenues, the mineral resource sector, particularly gold production, has no legal framework dictating how revenues from the sector should be used or appropriated.
“The mandate of PIAC should be reviewed to include the other natural resource revenues if the creation of a similar institution would be seen as a duplication of function,” said Khiddir Iddris, Research Lead at BudgiT Ghana at the launch of the organisation’s two new reports on the activities of PIAC and the Ghana National Petroleum Commission (GNPC) on Tuesday, September 6, 2022.
For more than a century, Ghana has been one of the major exporters of the commodity from the Africa Continent.
Despite the many decades of gold production, management and efficient use of revenues from gold exports has been poor.
In 2019 gold exports were valued at $10.8 billion, comprising 50 percent of all merchandise exports.
Currently, the country is the second largest producer of the commodity – this is after Ghana lost the number one position to South Africa this year following a 12% decline in gold production in 2021.
According to the 2021 Resource Governance Index by the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), Ghana’s oil and gas sector due to the implemented regulatory legal frameworks such as the PRMA Act, is governed better than the mining sector.
The NRGI noted that governance of the mining sector lags behind governance of the oil and gas sector.
Since its establishment in September 2011, PIAC has effectively exercised its oversight responsibility of monitoring and evaluating the management of Ghana’s petroleum revenues by the government and stakeholder institutions.
Project inspections, public fora and discussions on key petroleum revenue management issues have characterized the work of the Committee over the last decade.
For the past 10 years, PIAC has played its unique role as a citizen’s oversight body, serving as an interface between the Ghanaian public and managers of petroleum revenues.