GHANA MUST ADOPT AMERICA’S NEW TOUGH APPROACH TO ERRANT OIL COMPANIES!

One hopes that the quislings in our midst, who are lackeys of foreign powers in Ghana, and are wont to defend foreign commercial interests, vigorously, in the local media, and lobby our political class on their behalf as well (because they get crumbs from the table of those ruthless carpetbaggers!), listened to the merciless grilling of BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, by members of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the U.S. Congress, which convened on Thursday, June 17th 2010, for a hearing on "The Role Of BP In The Deep-water Horizon Explosion And Oil Spill," – part of that nation’s multi-faceted investigation into the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spillage. It is important that those currently in charge of our nation pay close attention to the way the U.S. government is reacting to BP – and adopt the same hard-nosed attitude in ensuring that all oil companies operating off our shores use the same safety standards that will be set by U.S. regulators, after the six-month moratorium on the drilling of oil in the waters off the U.S coastline whiles investigations into the causes of the disaster now being carried out, finally end.


It is really hard to believe that some of the members of the U.S. Congress who questioned Tony Hayward, including the one who told the BP CEO that Americans are not “small people,” are from the same institution, whose membership includes politicians who want our country to kow tow to Kosmos Oil and ExxonMobil: who have the effrontery to seek to dictate terms over how a finite resource, which Ghanaians are relying on to provide sufficient revenues to help transform their country, into Africa’s equivalent of the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia, are exploited. It really is intolerable that such arrogant politicians in the U.S think they can pressurize our leaders into agreeing to Kosmos and ExxonMobil dictating terms to our government. Why, are even little primary school children in Ghana, not aware, dear reader, of the base reasons for their perfidy? What hypocrites. To top that outrage, as we speak, ordinary Ghanaians do not even know the precise nature of the recent spate of spillages caused by Kosmos Oil – and what exactly they result from. Was the company engaged in the ’top- killing’ of a number of oil wells to cap them permanently – to spite our country, and stop any purchaser of its Jubilee oilfield stake (other than its preferred buyer, ExxonMobil!), from benefiting from its work, thus far?


Or did they result from corner-cutting emanating from financial pressures on Kosmos Oil: as cash for their Ghanaian operation dries up, because the original speculators who put money into the private equity fund that invested in the company, now want to exit from the market: and take their huge profits? If Kosmos Oil’s cavalier attitude thus far, is anything to go by, our political elite must get Ghana’s parliament to copy, word for word, all the penalties those U.S. regulatory bodies recommend be imposed on BP and other oil companies that spill oil off America’s shores: for future deployment here, should the need ever arise. It will be suicidal for Ghana to rely, for example, on Zoil’s Mickey Mouse post-spillage environmental clean-up solutions: the oil industry clean-up equivalent of a very bad joke, to deal with bringing the natural environment back to the stage it was in, before an oil spillage occurred here. How many miles of booms; hundreds of boats with trained crews; and what quantity of cutting-edge chemical dispersant do they have stored at strategic locations along our shores, I ask, dear reader? Clearly, our usual way of bending over backwards to please foreign companies exploiting our natural resources for vast profits whiles we get peanuts by comparison, will not suffice in the case of the oil industry. It is crucial that Ghana ensures that if such a disaster were to occur here, we will have tough enough laws in place, which will oblige oil companies to pay for the entire cost of the restoration of the natural environment to the pristine state it was in, before a spillage occurred – even if it amounted to US$20 billions. Above all, we must force the oil companies to adopt the same safety standards that guide their U.S. operations, here too. One hopes that those who now rule Ghana will resolve to ensure that that becomes the norm in Ghana’s oil and natural gas industry – so that oil does not become a terrible curse for Mother Ghana, but a real blessing. A word to the wise…


Tel (powered by Tigo - the one mobile phone network in Ghana that actually works! ): + 233 (0) 27 745 3109 & the not-so-hot and clueless Vodafone wireless smartfone: + 233 (0) 30 2976238.