Good evening distinguished personalities here. I am really humbled to have the opportunity to be present first of all, and also to see the great people in this room and that of course has really tamed my presentation this evening. It has been a beautiful celebration and I want to keep it that beautiful without pretending to be former President Rawlings as I intended to.

I haven't known Professor Aki for that long but I remember the very first encounter I had with him. I remember meeting him and I was explaining on the work he has done negotiating mining contracts and I was telling him that I was alarmed by some of the contracts we were signing in the petroleum sector as well. We had a chat, and he equally became alarmed and said I should send the contract to him, for him to take a look at, so I said I'd do so. Before I got home, I had received a mail from Prof asking for the contract and I was like, he's so busy trying to understand what had gone wrong. That showed a man who was interested in fixing what is wrong with Ghana and listening to the speeches, it reflects on everybody's mind, the kind of person Prof has been.

Tonight, the sort of things he has been doing in the resource sector keeps me asking the question, to what end has Prof done the risky part, renegotiating contracts and that brings you against the big players in this world; companies whose turnover are bigger than the GDP of the economy. And you're making enemies within and without. The lobbyists are not your friends and the worst part is they're Ghanaians. If we cannot achieve the ultimate of ensuring that once the contract is negotiated or renegotiated and the fiscal gains are made on paper, we can actually actualise that through the output of the extraction of the resource, then he's worked in vain. And that is the sad story we have to contend with as a people, going forward.

I listened to Mr. Abugre talking about the way inequality is widening and highlighting some of the issues that have been raised in OXFAM's report which actually shows that while a few are still getting richer, we are still sinking more below the poverty line; and we are blessed enough to have resources that should be able to catapult us and ensure that we are redistributing or sharing our wealth equitably to bring people out of poverty.

The two critical things that I want to share is that after the contract is renegotiated we have a duty to ensure that we are able to optimise the terms of the contract, that we are able to get our fair share of what we have signed up to, on paper. We did some work around 2015 and we realised that if we model even the worst of the contracts based on the world price of oil, gold etc., we were getting a minimum of30% offiscal take for the country. Then we pick the actual receipt and compare with the output, we are doing about 7%. So it's not really what we are getting on paper, somebody has to have that duty of ensuring that we are actually optimizing what we have negotiated for and that is a big challenge.

We keep talking about not having capacity to monitor the extraction of the resources at big conferences about illicit financial flows, but we are the same people working with the companies. You go into a typical mining firm and the Ghanaians are more than 80% so who is watching the illicit financial flow to happen. It is a duty on all of us to ensure that what people have worked for is not in vain. We need to ensure that the institutions that are supposed to ensure that we get our fair share actually deliver on that and we are not going to be able to do that if they are politicians. We are not going to be able to do that ifthe decisions that they are taking are not independent and are not held accountable for their decisions.

That is why we keep saying that we need to have a resource, a capable GRA to be able to monitor our resource sector and ensure that we are benefiting. We are not going to achieve that because they are not independent. We cannot have board members dealing the Chief Executive and have a stronger institution. It is not going to happen. What time do you have to do the actual business if your core business is actually engaging the companies at the table.

So that is a major concern in ensuring that we actually benefit from the resources. Another sad part is that though we are not getting enough, the little we are getting is virtually being abused. The efficiency of spending is woeful and we do know that in Ghana, most of our projects happen getting to the election time; the third year and the fourth year is when you see a lot of contracts being signed and negotiated. So a lot of these projects are signed and if there is a political change, 90% chance is that the project will not be continued so we would have sunk billions of dollars into those projects but they would simply not be continued. So we have to start new projects and we waste the money.

We have looked at some projects from the oil sector because we were meticulous to ensure that how we spend our oil revenue deviates from what we have done with solid minerals. So, we set up a legal framework that says that we should prioritise sectors to achieve effect, to ensure that we are developing sectors, we are creating opportunity for our people. So the objective of that law really speaks to equity and how we share the revenue and spend across the country, it speaks to efficiency of spending but sadly, you see one project going on for years, never gets completed so we see cost overruns and time overruns on those projects and every year money is pumped into those projects. So some of the projects, we see a cost overrun of 120% because we are not disbursing enough funds to those projects. And if we are not spending efficiently and wasting the money, we are not going to be able to have enough resources to lift people out of poverty. We have become crisis managers and a lot of the money going into managing crisis all the time and not actually fixing the problems that ensure that we can bridge the inequality gap and it's a major problem that we have to contend with.

We have to now come to the table and say that as a country, our problem really, is not who is leading us but our failure to extract accountability from leadership is really the problem. We do not need angels to lead us, but we need to hold the leaders accountable even if it is the devil leading us. It is as simple as that.

We should not be too NOC to wish that an NPP government fails and vice versa. We should be able to empower our people to know that a party should not fail to lose an election but ideas can make you win an election. So that we're not busy praying one fails but we are actually exchanging ideas that improves our country and through that inefficient system we are creating businesses that can only endure a maximum of eight years. So, we have a contractor who runs all the contracts for four or eight years, and within another set of four years, he's so broke. So all of us have to come to the table to say that we need to create a system that functions, that actually creates a safety net because when you are broke after the eight years, you may need a system that can actually provide a psychologist to start working on your struggles because you don't have the money nor contract, and that social safety net doesn't even exist for you. You come to realise the need for us to have a country that works and functions for all of us.

The reality of the work we've done over the years shows that if we are efficient, if we can really monitor the resources that we have, we will not be just relying on loans to pretend to be developing our country, but we can have enough resources to lift people out of poverty, we will have enough resources to ensure that we develop this country.

So Prof, we have to continue doing what you've been doing and charge all of us to be part of the process. Charles talked about the fact that we don't lack policy, we don't. But, the reality also is that sometimes the policy is developed at the round table where just a few of us are around the table so citizens don't share in the opportunities that the policy presents. So you have a local content policy that says to empower Ghanaians and politicians become the contractors because they are the ones who were at the table and saw the opportunity.

Academia was not there, industry was not present when the policy was being developed. So, the opportumties that the policy presents, those who are supposed to be the beneficiaries don't even know what is in the policy. So, you are the minister, you set up the company and you award a local content component to it. So, we need to activate that active citizenship. Unfortunately, I was not here yesterday so I don't want to repeat what probably was shared, and get people to demand what actually belongs to them. That way if you have the leadership we straighten them. Four years is not an annexation of every right in this country but you are supposed to steer the affairs and guide all of us into a country that we actually want to see. Thank you very much for the opportunity.