Benjamin Boakye
THE AFRICA Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) has urged government to initiate discussions on Agyapa Royalties deal as “promised last year” to avoid another rush agreement and conclusion of the deal.
Benjamin Boakye, Executive Director of ACEP, who made the call Thursday in Accra at the close of a two-day training for journalists, said civil society was still waiting for an open discussion on the Agyapa Royalties Deal, to ensure that it resonated and served the public good eventually.
“We are waiting to see how robust the next Agyapa will look like and how the valuation will account for the concerns we earlier raised,” Mr. Boakye said.
The training aimed at building the capacity of journalists to understand and use the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC), the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), and the Annual Petroleum reports, to track, monitor and report on resource revenue expenditure in Ghana.
ACEP collaborated with the Ford Foundation, to organise the training.
Mr. Boakye explained that since 2020 when President Akufo-Addo instructed that engagements should be done with all people who had had issues with the transactions of the deal, such engagements had not happened yet.
“We only saw one forum in Legon with students who didn’t even ask any questions and that couldn’t have been the engagement.
“So, we are happy and ready to engage and share our thoughts with the government. If the principle is to really do something new that will benefit Ghana. Nobody should be afraid to engage and debate,” he pointed out.
He said the government must also be able to debate what was informing the action of investing Ghana’s gold royalties, and ensure that, “We are exhausting the conversation on such a national estate that we want to sell a portion to confirm that we are doing the right thing.”
Commenting further on the deal, Mr. Boakye, explained that the current state of the Agyapa deal, vis-a-vis the projections in the 2020 and 2021 budgets, and how much money Ghana was made from gold royalties, if it was allowed to go on, would have made “us sold ourselves very cheap to the investor.”
In an attempt to raise capital to cushion the national economy amidst the COVID-19, Ghana embarked on a plan to leverage the country’s gold royalties in an “innovative financing solution in which it would assign a significant portion of its future gold mining royalties to an offshore company it had created in return for a $500 million cash up front.
The government through that transaction, was hopeful to raise non-debt cash up front by floating almost 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 is also said to be fraught with higher risks since most of the country’s current gold production was included in the deal.
The call for further public consideration and consultation would, therefore, create the opportunity to strengthen the deal for the benefit of the country, some experts have argued. – GNA