Citizens must safeguard resources against abuse – Dr Manteaw

• Dr Manteaw (inset) addressing
participants in the seminar

The Co-Chair of the Ghana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (GHEITI), Dr Steve Manteaw, has proposed that citizens must ensure that revenues from extractive resources are safeguarded against official and industry abuses.

He underscored the need for Ghanaians to ensure that district assemblies found creative and innovative ways of channeling the revenues into capital investment and not for social investments.

He said revenues from mining, oil and gas business should create enormous potentials for local economic development, but, argued, “Development will happen only when the citizens are active.”

Dr Manteaw advocated the radical change in resource governance at a dissemination seminar on Monday at Beyin in the Ellembelle District of the Western Region to discuss the GHEITI 2021/2022 mining, oil and gas reports and the maiden 2020 Artisanal and Small-scale Mining (ASM) report.

Participants were District Chief Executives, Coordinating Directors, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Mineral Commission.

He stressed that, “Citizens must be engaging with the companies and local authorities in ensuring the prudent use of resources coming from these sectors, no matter how small.”

He further recognised that development at Mampong Akwapim, a community without any mining resources, should not surpass Ellembelle that gets common fund, mineral royalties, corporate social responsibility programmes, ground rent and also employment.

District Assemblies, according to Dr Manteaw, must begin to set their development priorities right and develop strategies to avoid “all your common funds and the mineral royalty going into social investments and not into capital investment.”

“You are not building markets to collect tolls and generate revenue to finance the problem. Sometimes you prioritise to undertake certain capital projects.”

For example, the GHEITI Co- Chair narrated, Ellembelle could tap the huge coconot husks and palm kernel to produce critical activated carbons to feed the mining enclaves.

Sustainable Development Goals, Dr Manteaw asserted, ensured that countries rich in mineral and hydrocarbon resources turn the resources for the benefits of their people.

The developed world, notably United Kingdom, apart from the pillage, he said, developed on the basis of mineral extraction, extracting coal for energy and iron for the steel industry to produce machines during the Industrial Revolution.

The Western Regional Minister, Mr Kwabena Okyere Darko-Mensah, noted that government had made a conscious effort to create avenues for more transparent and judicious management of revenues from the extractive sectors.

This, he said, was to safeguard the revenues and ensure that they provided lasting benefits to the people of Ghana.

Mr Darko-Mensah mentioned that Ghana had made efforts to stem illicit financial flows from the country, using counter measures, including a beneficial ownership disclosure regime to reduce incentives for corruption in the extractive industry.

FROM CLEMENT ADZEI
BOYE, BEYIN