Recent reductions in oil production from Ghana's oil fields should be a wake-up call to the government to diversify its revenue sources in funding its flagship programmes such as the free Senior High School policy(SHS), Dr Steve Manteaw, Co-chair of Ghana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative GHEITI) has reiterated.
He noted that the free SHS policy could face a possible collapse in its current structure if a more feasible financing mechanism were not instituted to safeguard it future implementation and sustainability.
He explained that since 2021 all the three oil fields; jubilee, TEN and SGN fields were recording decline oil production contrary to their expected life span, adding that, "this was likely to affect government estimated revenues in prosecuting its developmental initiatives."
He further called for more investments into the sector to either re-engineer the existing oil fields to increase productivity or discover new oil fields.
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Dr Manteaw made the call during a presentation on the 2021/2022 GHEITI reports for the mining and Oil/Gas sectors in Sunyani of the Bono Region.
The dissemination workshop, organised by GHEITI, in partnership with the Ministry of Finance was aimed at sharing findings and recommendations of revenue use and management of mineral sectors of the economy to ensure transparency and participation by citizens.
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It was attended by a cross section of the general public including officials from the Minerals Commission, Administrator of Stool lands, Ghana Gas and some nongovernmental organisations.
Mr Fadi Iddi, assistant economic officer at GHEITI, in a presentation disclosed that aggregated out put of gold production of small and large scale rose from 2.820 million ounces in 2021 to 3.735 million ounces in 2022.
He emphasised that growth in production was due to concurrent growth in production in both small scale, artisanal mining and large scale producers.
Gold revenue also increased from four milion dollars to over five million dollars in the same year period.
The Bono Regional Minister, Justina Owusu Banahene, said the decline in revenue from the extractive sectors of the economy called for prudent public financial management measures to ensure such development did not distort government's public expenditure projections.
