APA – Accra (Ghana)
President Akufo-Addo’s call for the building of strong financial institutions in Africa in order to support its development is one of the trending stories in the Ghanaian press on Tuesday.
The Graphic reports that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has stated that without Africa’s own strong financial institutions, the development of the continent will remain a mirage because relying on foreign capital is both risky and costly.
He said the reliance would also lead to huge financial leakages through the high cost of default-driven borrowing and interest payments and undermine the growth of African financial institutions’ domestic resource mobilisation and private sector development through cost of fund.
President Akufo-Addo, who is the African Union (AU) Champion of Financial Institutions, stated this when he opened the 30th anniversary and the Annual Meeting of the Afreximbank in Accra yesterday.
On the theme: “Delivering the Vision, Building Prosperity for Africans”, the five-day meeting has attracted over two dozens of sitting and former Presidents and Prime Ministers of Africa and the Caribbean as well as leaders of global financial and other institutions.
“The ownership of our financial institutions should be strengthened over time to enhance continuously their development and relevance,” President Akufo-Addo said and suggested that some key interventions were important to strengthen the development impact and financial wherewithal of such development financial institutions.
He suggested capital and effective coordination with the AU as two main points and touching on capital, he said, despite consistent efforts made by many African governments, including during extremely difficult macroeconomics in global operating environments, Africa’s development finance institutions remained highly undercapitalised.
The newspaper says that the Director of Passport, Alhaji Mohammed Habib Idris, has said that the country will migrate onto a chip-embedded passport (e-passport) this year in line with best practices, After a successful migration, the nation would be in the league of about 150 countries that are currently using the e-passport.
Ambassador-designate of Ghana to the State of Kuwait, Alhaji Idris, who was speaking in an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday, said the new passport was expected to be launched by the last quarter of this year.
The director, who is involved in the project, however, said work on the new system would commence before he assumed his new role.
Alhaji Idris further explained that the “nation’s decision to switch from the current biometric system to the chip-embedded passport is also to comply with standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) member countries”.
“It is also to enhance the security and integrity of the nation’s passport,” he added.
The e-passport project, which is under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, is being implemented through a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement.
On the timely issuance of passports, the Director said there had been some improvement over the years and as a result, people no longer trooped to Accra to access their passports following the establishment of centres across the country.
The centres were set up upon assumption of office of the current government in 2017, and at the moment there are 13 passport centres in the country where applicants can access their passports.
“All what you have to do is to apply through an online portal we have introduced to allow us facilitate the process for you to have your passport.
“We have come a long way in the processing and delivering of passports; evolving from the issuance of high return passports to machine readable passport and now doing biometric passport.
The Ghanaian Times reports that Ghana recorded $1.43 billion in petroleum receipts for 2022, representing an increase of 42 per cent over the projected revenue for the year 2022.
The figure also constitutes an increase over the $783.33 million in petroleum revenue the country recorded in 2021.
Apart from the 2022 revenue from petroleum production, the other highest receipts of $978.02 million and $976.09 million were recorded in 2014 and 2018, respectively.
A member of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC), Alhaji Suleman Anderson, who gave the figure, was speaking at a three-day engagement with editors and morning show hosts at Elmina in the Central Region.
The workshop, held in partnership with GIZ, witnessed the presentation of the 2022 annual report compiled by the Committee.
Participants were taken through 2022 PIAC Annual Report on the management and use of petroleum revenues, as well as other petroleum revenue management-related issues.
Alhaji Anderson explained that, the significant increase in the price of crude oil on the global market was due to the Russia-Ukraine war and favourable international crude oil prices.
He said “the Russia-Ukraine war only gave us trouble downstream but compensated us at the upstream level for the losses we incurred downstream.”
He, however, stated that, despite the increase in petroleum revenue in the country, oil production was on the decline, with 51.1 million barrels of crude oil in 2022 as against 55.05 million barrels of crude oil in 2021.
“Crude oil production has been declining for three consecutive years. The average decline over the three-year period is 10 per cent,” he explained.
The newspaper says that a total of 11,530,672 seedlings were distributed for planting across the country as part of the year’s Green Ghana Day (GGD) Project.
This exceeded the national target of 10,000,000, representing 15 per cent.
The seedlings planted, included cashew, Africa oil palm, coconut, mango, orange, acacia, teak, mahogany and bamboo.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Forestry Commission (FC), Mr John Allotey, disclosed these at a press briefing on the distribution of seedling for the 2023 GGD project, in Accra last Wednesday.
The meeting, which was to give an overview of this year’s GGD programme, brought together heads of department of the Forest Service Division, Wildlife, Climate Change and Plantation.
Mr Allotey stated that this year, 60 per cent of the planting covered the forest reserved as compared to last year of 38 per cent.
He said seedlings were yet to be distributed to the Northern, North East, Upper East and Savannah Regions, due to the rainfall pattern.
GIK/APA