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Mr. Noble Wadzah, President of PIAC
The Public Interest and Responsibility Committee (PIAC) has begun working with the Office of Economic and Organized Crimes (EOCO) to investigate some violations of the Petroleum Revenue Management Act of 2011 (PRMA Law 815).
This is because in the last 10 years after the law was passed, there have been many infractions without any punishment and this has therefore encouraged people to continue breaking the law.
The violations, according to PIAC, included failure to use allocated funds, diversion of funds to other projects, and failure to properly account for how oil revenues had been used.
PIAC President Mr. Noble Wadzah, who said this in a presentation to editors and senior journalists at Peduase near Aburi in the Eastern Region last Saturday, said the committee’s monitoring indicated that while funds remained unused and unaccounted for, the projects they were intended to finance were incomplete.
“If we don’t address this, we may be charting the path to a resource curse that the law seeks to prevent,” Mr. Wadzah emphasized.
Curse of resources
The debate on how to avoid a resource curse raged in 2007 when the country discovered oil, but the law created the environment to prevent it.
The PIAC president, therefore, was concerned that ten years from now the path to the resource curse was being created.
He insisted that if the law was not applied to the letter, especially by enforcing the penalties that accompany it, the people who were in charge of using the oil revenues would improperly apply it with impunity.
In its 2019 report released in the first quarter of the year, PIAC noted that GH ¢ 1.5 billion of the oil money allocated to finance the national budget, also known as ABFA, had not been used and had not been accounted for either.
Mr. Wadzah said that PIAC had no prosecutorial powers and had relied on Parliament and other duty bearers to whom its reports went to exercise its enforcement mandate and demand accountability.
“This is where we ask Parliament to apply its oversight mandate,” said the president of PIAC.
Long term plan
Mr. Wadzah called for a long-term development plan to align with the utilization of oil revenues, and said that was the position that the law envisaged at the beginning.
“We cannot continue to condemn ourselves to second-level thinking about the law and make that the default position. So we should be able to present a plan as a larger national board for citizens to see because the law itself is trying to achieve the purpose of making oil a blessing for the country, not a curse, “he said.
The president of PIAC explained that, based on how the country had misused its mining revenues in the past, the law had been drafted in a way that promoted the channeling of revenues to specific areas and projects to ensure profitability.
Health sector
PIAC Technical Manager Mr. Mark Agyemang, who made a presentation on health financing, said that from 2017 to 2019 the health sector attracted only 3.2 percent of the funds allocated to the four sectors in the budget.
In 2017, the sector received GH ¢ 22.70 million, which represents 2.6 percent of the ABFA; GH ¢ 8.66 million in 2018 (2.74%) and GH ¢ 46.34 million in 2019 (3.65%) of the total use of ABFA.
“This brings ABFA’s total funding to the health sector from 2011 to 2019 to GH ¢ 77.70 million, of the total ABFA utilization of GH ¢ 5.74 billion, which represents 0.76 percent” stated Mr. Agyemang.
Therefore, PIAC highlighted the importance of channeling not only substantial amounts of funds to the sector, but also earmarking some to finance goods and services, some of which could be used to provide incentives to motivate health workers to accept positions in disadvantaged parts of the sector. country.
“We see the health infrastructure, but many of them do not have the full staff to serve them. Part of the budget for goods and services can be used to motivate people to go there, ”said Agyemang.
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