The practicalities will be seen from how Accra develop an oil and gas policy that will make it either different from other African states where either oil or dominant natural resource-based economy has failed to alleviate poverty or draw parallel with others, such as Batswana, where a dominant natural resource has brought sustainable prosperity.
While former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan told Ghana's Parliament that Accra should not "look to the discovery of oil as the panacea to the nation's problems," a lot of Ghanaians believe oil will be magic potion to resolving poverty. Panacea or not, many Ghanaians feel so. But in the natural resource-development scheme of things, as the Botswanans will tell Ghanaians, feelings are one thing and real hard thinking another.
In the larger scheme of the oil find, hard thinking will displace raw feelings, which is what Annan is saying, in using oil to assuage poverty. If ever there were an urgent case for study about energy windfall and poverty alleviation in the face of the oil find, it is Ghana's Akosombo Dam, the showcase of Ghana's global energy feat - which energy gurus, come to think of it today, admit lacked the "long-term visionary approach" needed to manage the windfall from the energy sector.
