Since the commencement of commercial production in April 2011 Ghana has earned about $3 billion from oil. According to the Petroleum receipts report, the money was earned from the country’s share of crude oil that was exported, as well as taxes paid by companies operating in the country’s oil fields. Businessday reports

In 2011, Ghana’s legislators enacted important governance reforms to manage resource extraction, having been stung by its previous experiences as a gold producer. The Petroleum Revenue Management Act (PRMA) was meant to quarantine petroleum revenues from other fiscal revenues and enabled journalists, civil society groups and parliamentarians to undertake forensic analyses of how the government was managing the proceeds from oil. It also created a framework for managing revenue volatility and saving for the future.

Furthermore, Ghana’s oil proceeds contribute about 8 % of total government revenues. While the government managed to save $500 million in its petroleum fund by end of 2014, the PRMA failed to constrain the damaging effects of a $18 billion increase in public debt over the same period, although the PRMA calls for a majority of annual expenditures, officially designated as deriving from petroleum revenues, to be directed toward public investment, capital spending has actually fallen from about 26 % of spending to 17 % since oil production commenced.

As at the end of June, the Ghana Petroleum Investment Fund had a total amount of $484 million. The Stabilization Fund, which was meant to stabilize and mitigate the impact of crude oil hikes, has about $233 million, while the Heritage Fund has $250 million. Also, for the first half of this year, government grossed $213 million as total receipts from crude oil exports.

In general, instead of saving or investing for the future, Ghana has burdened itself with liabilities in order to pay the wage bill. For this reason, the country remains ill-equipped to manage swings in commodity prices and transform its resource revenues into meaningful development outcomes.