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Civil society organizations have urged the government to start talks on the Agyapa Royalties deal as “promised last year” to avoid another rushed deal and the deal being concluded.
The African Center for Energy Policy (ACEP), which launched the call, said civil society was still awaiting an open discussion on the Agyapa royalty agreement, to ensure it resonates and serves the public good at the end of the day.
“We are waiting to see what the next Agyapa will look like and how the evaluation will take into account the concerns we have raised previously,” CAPE Executive Director Benjamin Boakye said Thursday in Accra.
Mr Boakye was addressing the media at the end of a two-day training course for journalists, which aimed to strengthen their ability to understand and use the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC), the Initiative for Extractive Industries Transparency (EITI) and Annual Petroleum Reports, to track, monitor and report spending related to resource revenues in Ghana.
CAPE, in collaboration with the Ford Foundation, organized the training which aimed to improve the capacity of the media to effectively inform citizens and to demand government accountability on extractive resource management.
Mr Boakye explained that since the last time in 2020, when President Akufo-Addo called for commitments to be made with all the people who had problems with the dealings of the deal, such a commitment had not been made. not yet taken place.
“We only saw one forum in Legon with students who didn’t even ask questions and that couldn’t be the engagement.
“So we are happy and ready to engage and share our thoughts with the government. If the principle is really to do something new that will benefit Ghana, no one should be afraid to engage and debate ”.
He said the government must also be able to discuss what has guided the action to invest Ghana’s gold royalties and ensure that “we exhaust the conversation on such a national domain that we want to sell a part to confirm that we are doing the right thing “.
“Civil society is not claiming superiority but what it is saying is that we have to debate the deal and make the most of it,” Boakye said.
He noted that all CSOs wanted was to judge him on the basis of the agreement that had been sent to Parliament and, “we can be clear that the public interest is being served.”
Commenting further on the deal, Mr Boakye explained that the current state of the Agypa deal compared to the projections of the 2020 and 2021 budgets and how much money Ghana has made from gold royalties, if it had been allowed to continue, reportedly said, “we sold ourselves very cheaply to the investor”.
In an attempt to raise capital to cushion the national economy amid the devastation of COVID-19 in most of the world’s economies, Ghana has embarked on a plan to leverage the country’s gold royalties in an “innovative financing solution in which it would allocate a significant part of its future gold”. mining royalties to an offshore company she created in exchange for an initial amount of $ 500 million.
The government, through the transaction, hoped to raise non-debt liquidity by floating nearly half of its shares in the company on the London and Ghana stock exchanges.
The Agyapa deal has been described as a creative solution to Ghana’s current economic constraints, but it is also said to carry higher risks since most of the country’s current gold production has been included in the ‘OK.
The call for more public scrutiny and consultation would therefore create an opportunity to strengthen the agreement to the benefit of the country, some experts argued.
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