The University of Ghana’s 75^th Anniversary series of lectures seeks to engage the public on topical issues of national concern. The first lecture, which happened on Wednesday, 25^th January, 2023, was on the future of Ghana’s oil and gas sector through the lenses of the energy transition at which Benjamin Boakye, Executive Director of the Africa Centre for Energy Policy, was a discussant.

Mr. Boakye’s submissions raised fundamental questions of how well Ghana has optimized her oil resources. His concerns were mainly centred around transparency and accountability, investment, data access, and bureaucracy. Today, not only are our ‘so-called’ transparency mechanisms without accountability; the transparency itself is becoming the rarest commodity in the oil and gas sector, he argued. “We have done all the roadshows but are not bringing in the investments, and the investors already here cannot get the needed permit to advance their work”. Moreover, as a Centre, like Mr. Boakye rightly mentioned, we do not think Ghana is doing much to take advantage of the window of opportunity left to produce our oil resources before the transition kicks in aggressively.

Ghana has many other opportunities beyond oil and gas, which we can optimise on the back of the energy transition. Our fear of losing oil revenue should not kill the prospects of developing our mineral resources that could be aligned with the energy transition.

ACEP is committed to the interest of the citizenry in performing its duties, which include knowledge creation and sharing. Accordingly, our work is guided by the standards of accuracy, evidence-based positions, and objective analysis of issues. We do not just communicate and expect that our views are accepted.