Handle report dispassionately …PIAC to Parliament

The Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) has urged parliament to handle its reports on the use of the country’s oil revenue dispassionately and without political considerations.

This it said would allow the recommendations to inform policy formulation and improve the sector for national development.

It said due to the partisan manner in which the reports had been handled over the last 10 years, the Committee could not point to even five major directions that had proceeded from its engagement with Parliament although PIAC is supposed to support parliament’s oversight responsibilities.

“Finding and recommendations that are not complimentary of the government, the opposition picks them up and use them against the government, then the government goes on the defensive and attacks the reports.

“It becomes New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC) banter until we have to close the meetings. There were no actions that were to be taken from these meetings. Parliament must do better, “said Mr. Isaac Dwamena, PIAC Coordinator.

He was making a presentation dubbed, “A decade of the management and use of the Petroleum revenues in Ghana” at the engagement with members of the Institute of Financial and Economic Journalists (IFEJ), and other media partners on PIAC’s 2021 semi-annual report held in Accra over the weekend.

He expressed worry that parliament had reduced the duration of its meeting with PIAC  from three days to about two hours, a situation that inhibited extensive discussions on the issues contained in the bulky reports.

 Since PIAC did not have the power to enforce its recommendations, he advocated that in the review of the Petroleum Revenue Management Act (PRMA), there should be an arrangement for the recommendations of the PRMA to be enforced “so that we see improvement in the use of oil revenue.”

Mr. Dwamena urged the government to identify and select a few legacy projects and support them with the Annual Budget Funding Amount (ABFA) of the country’s oil revenues.

It said the ABFA had been used on too many national problems simultaneously, weakening the potential impacts of the revenues on the socio-economic development of the country.

He advocated the conduct of impact evaluation of priority areas selected for ABFA support over the years to precede the selection of new areas.

On the Free Senior High School programme, which is one of the projects being funded by the ABFA, he said it was a good initiative but its funding sources should be diversified due to the volatile nature of petroleum revenues.

The PIAC Vice Chairman, Nasir Alfa Mohammed, in a presentation on the semi-annual report, urged the Finance Ministry to allow the Ghana Stabilisation Fund to grow so it could shore up ABFA expenditure when there are revenue shortfalls in the budget.

 BY JONATHAN DONKOR