The Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) has launched an online television channel, Oil Money TV, to help monitor how revenue from Ghana’s oil find is being appropriated as a way of improving accountability and transparency.
Speaking to Class Business, Deputy Director of ACEP Benjamin Boakye said citizens need to know the amount of revenue being generated from the oil sector and utilisation of those funds.
“We have been talking a lot of technical terms and sometimes it is difficult for people to appreciate or comprehend some of the technical terms that we mention. Talk about revenues, what the law says, what government is doing and the expectations of people and all that but we thought that it is important that we get everybody on board to understand the issues and one way to do that is to visibly track oil revenue expenditure with cameras so that citizens can see what we are doing with our oil revenue using a digital platform and online platform, so we shoot videos of projects that are receiving oil revenues and then we post them onto the platform,” he explained.
“This is an initiative from ACEP and supported by Oxfam. We are encouraging citizens, the media, and other civil society organisations to also take up this challenge to develop videos and bring them to the platform so that together all of us can track how our oil revenues are utilised, whether they are in consonance with our aspirations as citizens. That will be the judgment table for all of us to know what we are doing with our oil revenue.”
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com
