Re: “Who did the feasibility studies of our Ghana Black gold?”

This sad story, is a typical example of how in the coming years, future generations of Ghanaians will have to spend all the wealth of their oil-rich country, cleaning up the environmental pollution that our generation, in blind pursuit of GDP growth rates, without ever examining what actually constitute that growth, are allowing to go on in Ghana today.

Today, sundry profit seekers, many of them carpetbaggers without an iota of a sense of social conscience or ethical ethos underpinning their businesses, and who are most definitely not interested in the slightest, in acting responsibly in terms of the impact on the natural environment of their operations either, are getting away with environmental degradation that sometimes amounts to crimes against humanity - for the egregious examples of environmental pollution that they cause whiles chasing maximum profits: at the expense of our country and its people.

A typical example is the harm to the natural environment being caused countrywide, by surface gold mining companies, including "galamsay mining".

Unfortunately, we are saddled with an environmental protection agency (EPA) that is poorly resourced, and whose staff aren’t adequately motivated financially for the crucial role they are meant to play in protecting our natural heritage. The EPA as presently constituted, is virtually unable to prevent much of the degradation of our natural environment - as evidenced by the large swathes of the Ghanaian countryside that have been poisoned by dangerous chemicals, such as arsenic and mercury, leeching into soils.

Sadly, our unimaginative leaders, many of whom haven’t a clue about the frightening rate of the destruction of our natural heritage, particularly the fast rate at which Ghana’s biodiversity is being lost, do not think creatively enough to enable them act to halt this disastrous course.

Yet, all they need do, if we do not have the wherewithal to stand up to those destroying our natural heritage, is to work in partnership with some of the leading international environmental NGO’s such as Green Peace, Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund, and the Rain Forest Alliance. They can work at the grassroots level in private, public partnerships (PPP) between themselves, local communities and all of Ghana’s District Assemblies

As regards the oil deposits that we have (or do not have!), the fact of the matter is that if we do not nationalize that depleting resource by following the example of nations such as Venezuela and Iran, and make the grave error of judgment that the stooges of neocolonialism and the lackeys of foreign commercial entities now running Nkrumah’s Ghana are making today, and rather choose to continue leaving it in the hands of foreign oil and natural gas companies, we will wake up one day, to discover that like our gold, we have not been able to use our oil wealth to transform Ghanaian society into Africa’s equivalent of the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia.

Our leaders must understand that as things stand, our oil and natural gas will only end up mostly enriching the shareholders of the foreign oil companies now drilling for oil off our coast. We must be bold and seize the commanding heights of this burgeoning industry - and choose a business model that enables us to use joint-ventures between the best-resourced of the state-owned Chinese oil companies (with 30 per cent stakes! ) and the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) with 70 per cent shareholding, to exploit it.

We can always pay for our up-front contributions for such joint-ventures by paying the government of China, with Ghana’s sovereign bonds. We can also pay fair compensation to the foreign oil companies when we nationalize our oil and natural gas industries, by paying them the same way too.

Sadly, because of the unfathomable greed that drives some of our leaders, they prefer to have private foreign oil and natural gas companies controlling this important resource - because the powerful crooks amongst them would rather their own private special purpose vehicles (those opaque offshore entities they set up to launder their kickbacks!), secretly partner those foreign oil companies to exploit our oil and natural gas deposits: to ensure their personal gain and enable them send their personal net worth into the stratosphere. Pity.

Hmmm Ghana - entiye awiaye paa, enia? Asem ebeba debi ankasa! May God bless and protect our homeland Ghana, always. Long live freedom! Long live Ghana!