Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta, has disclosed that the Agyapa Mineral Royalties is to maximize the value inherent in the mineral wealth of the country.
According to him, the mineral transaction is in the best interest of the country and as such it is time to reimagine the future.
“President Akufo-Addo was clear in his mind that to achieve Ghana beyond aid we must add considerable value to what we produce and trade. We often fail to see this value because when assessing the effectiveness of our policies and legislation, we limit the extent of our expectation to our national borders. We take no interest in what happens to our resources when they leave our shores whether they are traded in foreign markets… or the different ways they are utilized to generate profits.
“So It is time to reimagine our future, we all by now must be tired by being cheated by foreign companies and we constraining ourselves from using the same vehicles that they use. We have to maximize value by income that is public from the mineral wealth that we have and for the benefit of our citizens and that is the prime objective of the MIIF, to maximize the value of the income due the republic from the mineral wealth of the country for the benefit of our people”.
At an engagement with the media, he rubbished claims that the government established Agyapa Gold Mineral Royalty Limited to mortgage the country’s ‘future resources’ to enrich the current administration.
“There are those who say we should be careful not to mortgage ourselves today, the gold for our future generations. This is not the case. But I have a few questions for people who have those concerns. If it is okay for foreign investors to hold concessions to sell what is on the ground up front then why not us? More importantly, why is it okay to borrow today for the future and not good to use our resources to leverage assets for tomorrow? We must be creative in our quest to raise revenue to support our development by giving direct access to our resources in a manner that is open and transparent and operates within laws that exist outside our country.
“The value chain includes the international stock market where incidentally virtually all the foreign investors who are involved in the extractive industry in Ghana are also operating. In assessing the value we receive, we often focus on the metrics such as the percentage of government taking and tax as the only means of assessing the value that’s retained by the resource owner, ourselves”.
Ken Ofori-Atta
The Minister also said, there was a need for government to create value for the country’s mineral resources, especially by leveraging that value to investors who do not want to invest directly in the country.
“The NPP government is determined to break the economy free from this old boundaries where the foreign investor can use the recoverable reserves in our country he has in the concession granted by us to him to raise money which he can choose to spend here or on other businesses he has elsewhere. Why can’t we do the same to maximize the benefit we get and use that additional income to accelerate our development and by so doing expand our economy?”
