The incoming government’s plans to relocate the headquarters of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) to the Western region is not prudent, the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) has stated.
The President-elect Nana Akufo-Addo during the electioneering and his visit to the Western Regional House of Chiefs in Sekondi to thank the chiefs for their support said: “The commitments that we have made are commitments that are going to be fulfilled. They were not platform or campaign talk. They were full commitments that we made… We are going to relocate the headquarters of GNPC to this region.”
But speaking at a media interaction in Accra, the Head of Policy Unit of ACEP, Dr. Ishmael Ackah described the move as “not well thought through because very soon we are going to produce oil in the Volta Region so are we going to shift GNPC from the Western Region to the Volta Region.”
He thus urged the incoming government to “maintain GNPC here and rather open a subsidiary office probably for operations in the Western Region. What we can also suggest is that instead of GNPC, we can rather move Petroleum Commission which is the regulator to the Western Region.”