GNPC will pursue Ghana's interest

The Board Chairman of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) Mr Ato Ahwoi has stressed that GNPC will diligently pursue the interest of the Ghana people in the oil sector. He said the GNPC “exists for the people of Ghana and (will) serve the public interest”. Mr Ahwoi was speaking at a press conference to address issue pertaining to the nascent oil industry in the country. Below is the full statement presented by the GNPC Board Chairman. Remarks By the Chairman, of the Board of Directors Ghana National Petroleum Corporation Hon. Ato Ahwoi Ladies and Gentlemen of the media, I would also like to welcome you and thank you for attending the first of what will definitely be many encounters between GNPC and the media. We appreciate the work you have done to keep interest in GNPC and we look forward to deeper cooperation. It is a true privilege for me to be here today representing the Board of GNPC. My task today is to provide some context for the more substantive presentations you will hear today from my colleagues in GNPC management. I would like to describe briefly the vision that has inspired and sustained the GNPC project for the last 25 odd years. Today, as we approach First Oil and as we celebrate Osagyefo's centenary, elements of this vision are hopefully clearer than has ever been the case before. This is why the oil sector is exciting so much media interest. However, ladies and gentlemen, it will still take a lot of hard work and sacrifice from all of us to realise this dream in its fullness and to deliver long-term value for our children and grandchildren. In describing this vision today I hope to infect you all with it and to encourage you to infect all your readers, listeners and viewers. Bottom line: GNPC exists for the people of Ghana and serves the public interest. It is only when we are fully engaged with, understand and understood by the public that we can together realise this dream. We have always understood this and always strive to deliver on this engagement. We expect a great deal more moving ahead. Ladies and Gentlemen, 25 years ago when we started out in GNPC, Ghana was reeling from oil price shocks of the '70s and Nigeria's embargo of oil supplies to Ghana. We were saddled with massive debt. Cocoa and gold prices had collapsed because of the recession in the developed countries following the oil crisis. Our national economic and social infrastructure - roads, bridges, factories, tractors, 'schools, and hospitals had deteriorated severely during the '70s partly because so much money had to be pumped into the oil procurement. We were struggling to fully re-absorb over one million Ghanaians expelled from Nigeria as that country tried to deal with their own socioeconomic crisis. National life was caught in a vicious downward cycle. Inevitably we were experiencing intense political instability. However, even in those dark days, we still cherished the vision that had inspired our independence struggles. We knew that it was possible acting together as a people to turn our situation around. We knew that it is possible relying on Ghanaian ingenuity and Ghanaian resources to industrialise national production and sustainably and equitably raise the economic, social and cultural standards of living of all our people. This dream inspired Nkrumah's creation of the industrial city of Tema, of hundreds of industrial facilities across the length and breadth of the country, of a quantum leap in public education and public healthcare and other social services. This dream inspired the visionary investments in the Volta River project, in nuclear energy research and in the exploration for indigenous oil and gas resources needed to sustain industrial development. There was no doubt in our minds that it was the betrayal of this vision in 1966 that had rendered Ghana so vulnerable to the global down turn of the early eighties. So, Ladies and Gentlemen, fortunately, confronted with this crisis Ghanaians returned to the blue print our founding fathers bequeathed us. National leadership decided to give a new impetus to its under-developed petroleum sector. We knew that Ghana had excellent potential for producing its own oil and gas. The evidence from onshore and offshore exploration from the late 19th and throughout the 20th century was more than encouraging - even though we were yet to make a major discovery. The real problem was clearly a hitherto passive attitude to the problem and thus a lack of urgency in our exploration effort. We needed to overcome this if we were to move ahead. Ladies and gentlemen, the strategy that Ghana selected to transform the oil sector was one that had proved and has continued to prove successful in several third world countries (India, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Iran, etc) in making their oil sectors major drivers of national development. Ghana opted to restructure its upstream sector completely, to separate it from the mineral sector and to establish an integrated national oil company through which we could progressively nationalise or domesticate all the possible benefits of the oil industry for our people. That is why in 1983 Ghanaians established GNPC "to undertake the exploration, development, production and disposal of petroleum". We wanted a strategic commercial vehicle through which Ghana would develop comprehensive national capacity in all areas of the oil and gas industry and through which Ghanaian institutions and communities could optimise their engagement with this industry. Our vision has always been that of a virtuous cycle in which we steadily increase our control over our resources for the benefit or our people. Let me elaborate a bit.

We want Ghanaians and Ghanaian institutions to be at the forefront of energy research. We must develop and patent new technologies and promote the social organisation required to optimise the use of these technologies. And in the 1980s and 1990s Ghanaians did develop and engineer and patent domestic gas use technologies based on a sustained engagement with rural women about their needs.
We want Ghanaians and Ghanaian institutions to master, deploy and improve on the sciences and technologies required to lead in the generation, synthesis, analysis and interpretation of the geological data that makes oil field discovery possible. GNPC in the 80s and 90s developed what was then a world class laboratory on the Spintex road. Today we are confident that there is no one who understands our regional petroleum geology better than we do in GNPC. That is why in the face of all the negative sentiments and the many voices that insisted that we were simply a drain on national resources we stayed focused on our task. That is why it is so sad for us today to hear people claiming exclusive credit for our growing success without acknowledging the years of dedicated scientific research and analysis that this is based on. It is not enough however to discover oil. There is no reason that Ghana's scientists and their institutions - Geological Survey Department, the various earth science and geographical departments in our tertiary institutions, should not become a centre of exploration excellence for data acquisition in the region and for outsourced data processing and analysis serving at our region and beyond.
We want Ghanaian public and private institutions to own and manage the equipment and infrastructure that constrain the proper investigation of our hydrocarbon and other subsea resources. It is not enough to have well trained reservoir, drilling, gas, pipeline etc engineers and other staff whose only role is to "monitor" what contractors are doing. GNPC is not a regulator or an inspector and does not aspire to be a regulator. The creation of a Ghanaian service industry requires that GNPC and other Ghanaian companies should own different kinds of onshore and offshore drilling rigs and related equipment. In the 1990s we owned drilling rigs including offshore drilling platforms (for which we now pay millions of dollars daily). We owned a small fleet of offshore supply boats, work boats and oil tankers. We owned our own fledgling helicopter service. These were an important source of income to GNPC. If we had retained this capacity we would be earning revenue for Ghana even now before first oil. More importantly they allowed us to develop the managerial capacity to integrate all these different complex operations commercially and to conduct exploratio.n independently of the international oil companies. In other words the pace at which we would realise national aspirations could no longer be dictated by foreign capital. GNPC did operate independently offshore Angola for example and learned the kind of valuable lessons that make for a strong independent oil company.
We want Ghanaians and Ghanaian financial institutions to take the lead in financing t~e growth of the oil sector. Huge sums of money are required to support exploration and production. Huge profits are made by those who finance these requirements. Huge opportunities for financial enterprise exist. We would like that profit to stay in Ghana and to be available to support other areas of economic and social development. We are willing, within our limited but growing means to support this. GNPC invested in ECOBANK Ghana limited and in other financial institutions in order to influence commercially the direction of the development of our financial industry.
We want Ghanaians and Ghanaian institutions to lead in the development of manpower for the sector. There is a need to upgrade our national technical training establishment. Ghana must produce and reproduce all levels of oil industry professionals and make it unnecessary to send hundreds and even thousands of our young people abroad to acquire basic training. GNPC has a responsibility to step up to the challenge of supporting our secondary schools, our polytechnics, our universities, the Regional Maritime Academy to provide the professional leadership that the industry needs. Again in the 1980s and 1990s GNPC channelled support to various earth sciences and engineering and scientific departments in the country to stimulate this healthy link. Once again we must concretise these relationships. Our vision is one in which Ghana's petroleum industry integrates constructively with other sectors of our national economy and society. Oil must not become an enclave or an island disconnected from everything else. Oil on its own will not be our salvation. Oil must help us to undertake other productive activities effectively. At every stage of the development of our petroleum sector we must seek optimal linkages that increase our peoples control over every aspect of their productive lives. We have learned from the mistakes of others who treated petroleum as a separate economy. That is why even in our formative years in the eighties and nineties as we begun to explore for resources GNPC made every effort to link our work to that of other national institutions and other sectors of the economy. We worked to integrate oil, power and cocoa industry financing thereby increasing the level of national control over both. We made strategic investments in high grade cocoa production to improve the revenue that Ghana could derive from this industry. We worked to support the development of a national salt industry. Salt was strategic. First, it allowed us to contribute to the livelihoods of communities where we hope to conduct exploration activity. Second, if the project had gone ahead it would have improved the terms of trade with Nigeria - which remains our principle source of crude oil. Third, a salt industry is critical if we are to develop an independent national petrochemicals industry. We invested in communications in order to support both our own operational needs and to bring an important service to the people of the Western region who at the time did not enjoy these services. The investments we made now exist as Zain Communications Ltd. I have mentioned that we invested in the banking sector. We invested in the oil products retail sector by acquiring an interest in Total Ghana Ltd. On a similar basis we supported the work of the Forestry Commission's Wildlife Division and the effort to establish eco¬tourism by upgrading hospitality facilities at the Mole National Park. None of these were arbitrary investments. All of them were strategic allowing us to fulfil our mandate to ensure that the nation benefits optimally from the petroleum industry.
Our vision goes far beyond conventional notions of corporate social responsibility. For us Ghana/s development and its people/s development is our core business and not a secondary operational issue. Again in the 80s and nineties GNPC invested heavily in developing a comprehensive proactive capacity to engage all our stakeholders including communities that might be affected by our work. We did this both through the media and through direct engagement. For us understanding the cultures/ aspirations/ organisation and needs of these communities and especially their youth and women and engaging them about our industry needs and the alternative approaches possible in order to achieve a meaningful contextualised consensus on oil industry development is the single most important key for success. Ladies and Gentlemen/ as you can see/ the vision goes far beyond just producing oil and gas from Ghana and earning revenues. And there are many challenges that we must face before we can be said to be a truly national industry serving collective needs and aspirations. Building an oil company is a highly complex endeavour. Building a nationally owned oil industry that is good enough for the Ghanaian people is an even more complex and challenging project. We absolutely believe that Ghanaians have the capacity to do this and we will do everything in our power to facilitate and lead this process within the framework set by national leadership. Ladies and gentlemen to achieve this we will need to dream with and work with the Ghanaian public. We will need to build on our excellent past platform of transparency and engagement. We will need a partnership particularly with you the media that provides an important two way channel of communication between us and the public. We have a lot to say starting today and we look forward to constructive critical engagement with all of you. I will now invite the Managing Director of GNPC Mr. Nana Asafu-Adjaye/ a veteran of Ghana/s oil industry and one of the individuals to whom we as a nation owe a real debt of gratitude to make his remarks. Source: Myjoyonline.com/Ghana

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