Kojo Poku, an energy specialist, said that no civil society organizations have participated in the vice president’s gold-for-oil barter strategy to date.
He claimed that the policy’s introduction was hasty since the National Petroleum Authority (NPA) had only recently started talking about the change.
Kojo Poku pointed out that because running policies with CSOs was an essential component of their execution, the vice president ought to have postponed the release.
“Policy credibility is very key. You can count the number of policies that the government has said they would do that civil society had come out to say that it is not possible, it is not going to happen that has happened. There is none,” he is quoted by 3news.com.
He also added: “I don’t even think you can come out with any. Government said they were going to do Agyapa, civil society said it wasn’t going to be possible and Agyapa was not done. GNPC said they were going to do Aker but we said it wasn’t going to be possible to do it and they couldn’t do Aker. PDS, we said it wasn’t going to last, it did not last.
He continued, .”.We in civil society have a track record in analyzing government policies and telling government that if we do not do extensive and proper engagement, this policy will not work and they do not listen, they just go ahead.”
“This seems to be one of those policies. I don’t know who in the energy sector that Dr Amin Antah [Deputy Minister of Energy] said they have engaged but I can assure you that they have not engaged anyone within our space, within the civil society space,” Kojo Poku stressed .
The Energy expert further pointed out that it was surprising to see the announcement made by Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia.
“I speak to quite a number of them and none of them has been engaged. My little investigation I have done shows that it was an initial discussion at the NPA level and nobody knows why it ended up on the Facebook page of the Vice President,” he noted.
The Vice President in a Facebook post announced that “Government is negotiating a new policy regime where our gold (rather than our US dollar reserves) will be used to buy oil products. The barter of sustainably mined gold for oil is one of the most important economic policy changes in Ghana since its independence.
“The barter of gold for oil represents a major structural change. My thanks to the Ministers for Lands and Natural Resources, Energy, and Finance, Precious Minerals Marketing Company, The Ghana Chamber of Mines, and the Governor of the Bank of Ghana for their supportive work on this new policy. We expect this new framework to be fully operational by the end of the first quarter of 2023,” he added.
Meanwhile, Dubai oil firm ENOC has denied being in talks with Ghana on the gold for oil barter arrangement.