Ghana’s ‘new path’ for handling oil revenue

When the oil rigs started pumping crude off the coast of Ghana’s Western Region in December 2009, many people hoped for better living standards and development. But some worried that the country did not have the necessary laws to properly manage the new revenues. They wondered whether Ghana would be able to break the “curse” that has often marked Africa’s oil and mining industries: decades of extraction that often saw only a few getting richer but the majority getting poorer, economic distortions caused by improperly managed resource wealth and hardly any money set aside for times when commodity prices dip or the wells dry up.