The Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) has reiterated calls for stakeholders, including the media, to help it hold government and other agencies accountable over the country’s petroleum revenue utilization and management.
According to PIAC, government, Parliament and other relevant stakeholders are yet to implement the findings and recommendations it made in its reports.
In an interview with Citi News on the sidelines of a capacity building workshop for members of the Institute of Financial and Economic Journalist (IFEJ) and some selected Parliamentary Press Corp over the weekend in Keta, the Vice Chairman of PIAC, Mohammed Nasir Alfa called on the media to help get relevant stakeholders to speed up implementation of recommendations made by the committee in accordance with its mandate to ensure transparency and accountability in the disbursement of oil funds at the subnational level.
“Per our laws, we are supposed to report to the elected representatives of the people of Ghana. We are also supposed to report to the President of the Republic of Ghana and then to the people of Ghana generally. So whichever way you look at it, because we do not have the prosecuting power to enforce our own recommendations, much will lie on both the President and Parliament of the Republic of Ghana to follow up on the recommendations of PIAC. When I say follow up on the recommendations, it is only the President or the Parliament of the Republic of Ghana who may give appropriate directives, either to the Attorney General, who holds the prosecutorial powers of the state or to any of the other agencies to whom the Attorney General has ceded some of its prosecutorial powers to for purposes of further investigations to be done of the findings of PIAC, and if possible, prosecution of those who are found culpable”.
“Now I add the Judiciary because I can foresee a time when cases involving findings and recommendations of PIAC, may finally end up in the court of law and there, the judiciary might come in handy and would be required to ask as much as possible, the greatest sense of upholding not necessarily the findings and recommendations of PIAC, but to the extent, as the justice may require of upholding those findings. That explains why I said, all the arms of government and I added the media as the fourth estate of the realm because PIAC can not do it alone. No matter what, we need the media to support us in our media advocacy and reaching out to all the people of the Republic of Ghana on our findings and recommendations and hopefully with the media support, we shall overcome”.
Mohammad Nasir Alfa indicated that public institutions who continue to flout provisions of the PRMA will soon be dragged to court when PIAC is finally empowered to do so.
“It is possible that the way and manner that institutions flout some of the provisions of the PRMA, we may get to a point where PIAC as an institution may be empowered to take them on. As I indicated, because PIAC is a creature of statute, it may hasten slowly to want to take public institutions by itself to court, however, constituent members of PIAC, i.e., representatives who are either currently serving on PIAC or have probably served on PIAC before or any other citizen of Ghana may want to follow up on some of the findings and recommendations of PIAC, by playing the watchdog role as a good citizen of Ghana or a citizen vigilante of Ghana by following up on some of those findings and calling on the relevant authorities to answer”.
The post PIAC calls for stakeholder action to enforce recommendations in its reports appeared first on Citinewsroom - Comprehensive News in Ghana.
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