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08 June 2007
GPPi gives interview on good governance in Africa's extractive industries for “Les Echos”
GPPi Associate Director Thorsten Benner and GPPi Fellow Ricardo Soares de Oliveira gave an interview to the French newspaper “Les Echos” on the 8 June 2007. The interview focuses on how to help African populations secure the development dividend from oil. In times where the world's fastest growing source of oil is West Africa, a way has to be found to avoid that the African petrodollars benefit only kleptocratic elites while the broader population does not receive any development dividend from Africa’s oil riches. Benner and Soares de Oliveira argue that the issue of transparency and good governance in Africa's oil producers has to be put on the agenda by western countries.
According to the Benner and Soares de Oliveira, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) – which is supported by the G-8 and other countries and under which producer governments and companies can voluntarily commit themselves to disclosing all payments from corporations to governments and all government revenue from oil – is not sufficient, because the purely voluntary initiative lacks teeth. To tackle the problem, Benner and Soares de Oliveira suggest that Western countries should move good governance to the center of the discussion on energy security, should impose travel bans on the corrupt elites of petro-states and should promote the transparency of financial flows not just within the producer countries, but throughout the global financial system. Furthermore, consumer power should be mobilized: if the majority of Western consumers would demand "development oil" at the pump, the pressure for promoting good governance would increase.
To read the full interview (in French), please click here. For a full page view, please click here.
For further information and articles on GPPi's work on good governance in the extractive industries sector, please click here.
For further information please contact Thorsten Benner.