Oil & Gas Conference

On Friday I attended a conference on the theme of “Building Consensus between Civil Society and Members of Parliament on Ghana’s Oil and Gas Governance.” This is a topic that I am quite interested in, as my blog readers (all seven of them) can likely tell. 

The purpose of the two-day conference was for members of civil society (NGOs, academics, activists, community leaders etc.) to discus a few key oil and gas bills with members of parliament to ensure that these bills address “the people’s” concerns. 

The conference was quite enlightening, particularly a presentation made by Dr. Steve Manteaw, an active member of several organizations that advocate for responsible oil and gas exploration such as ISODEC, Public Agenda and Publish What You Pay. Dr. Steve (as he was nicknamed) opened the conference with a rather sobering presentation on the lessons learned from Ghana’s mining industry. Ghana, like many other developing countries, is a mineral-rich country with financially-poor results. Ghana is the second largest producer of gold in Africa after South Africa and has a history of managing its own gold mining for over 100 years. “And yet,” Dr. Steve asks,  “What do we have to show for it?” The attendees in the room scuffed and uttered “nothing.”

Ghana encountered the same challenges with its mining industries as other resource-rich but economically-poor countries. This is the mistake of incentivizing foreign direct investment to such a degree that the country barely reaps any benefit. In fact, the country often suffers further because it cannot make enough money to offset the huge socioeconomic and health costs the mining industry brings about.

It should be noted that the responsibility for the creation of these debilitating financial incentives does not fall solely on the poor countries. On the contrary, the responsibility for many of these disastrous incentives falls equally (if not more) on the multi-national corporations that set inhumane levels of competition for their investment. It is this type of corporate greed that leads to the creation of sweatshops and child labour (the latter of which has an unfortunate presence in some of Ghana’s mining towns). Poor countries become so desperate for foreign capital that they offer competitive prices and tax incentives that result in little profit and a dependency on the foreign corporations operating on their land. Often this disastrous example of free market competition is a result of the IMF's Structural Adjustment Program which demands its loaner countries to encourage foreign investment at any cost. 

One specific example of an unsustainable and harmful incentive that Ghana has offered foreign corporations is when the nation offered mining companies the opportunity to operate in Ghana tax-free for 15 years! When Dr. Steve stated this, I got to hear my FAVOURITE Ghanaian reaction in surround sound throughout the room. It’s a quick “a-ow!” that comes with a twisted face and a cocking of the neck reserved for times when someone has said something offensive, embarrassing, surprising (but in a negative way) or downright disappointing. I absolutely love this reaction and it never ceases to make me laugh. Sometimes people even do it at the punchline of a nasty joke. I think I subconsciously find ways of provoking this reaction in people. The “a-ow!” will most definitely be coming back to Canada with me. 

The rest of the conference was equally as interesting, though there was noticeable lack of discussion around the wellbieing and livelihoods of people in the oil and gas communities. Many of those on the “civil society” end of things broached the subject, but sadly it seemed many of the MPs in attendance were unengaged and, as many people complained, uninterested.