Revenue Watch Pilots "Regional Hub" for Capacity Building

Revenue Watch and its partners in Ghana took a remarkable step in building local capacity this July, with the launch of our first Africa Regional Extractive Industry Knowledge Hub in Accra. The Hub will be a training resource on extractives and related governance issues for members of civil society, parliament, media and sub-national governments from throughout West Africa. The Hub is a pilot program that RWI plans to replicate over the next several years in other resource-rich regions, including Latin America, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and Southeast Asia.

Revenue Watch's regional Hub program is intended to train key stakeholders and empower trainees to train other citizens, activists and members of government and industry. This approach enables regional institutions to better serve their local and national interests, by developing and drawing on a base of local knowledge. While some resource-dependent countries have managed to establish pockets of knowledge and expertise in extractive resource management, most have severe deficits in their capacity to make prudent decisions on incomes and expenditures and undertake effective oversight.  Even in countries with some capacity, wide knowledge gaps persist between the groups whose combined expertise is needed for effective growth.

"We are building capacity to build capacity," explained RWI Training and Capacity Building Program Officer Angela Mugore. "We're establishing a Hub, to be run by Africans for Africans." Read more …

As Obama Calls for Transparency in Ghana, Revenue Watch Asks Leaders in Africa and the U.S. to Secure Oil Wealth Through Oversight

In anticipation of President Barack Obama's historic visit to Ghana in July, Revenue Watch called on U.S. and Ghanaian leaders to make good governance the centerpiece of energy policy in both nations.

Ghana has been in the grip of an "oil fever" since its 2007 discovery of offshore reserves estimated at between 600 million and one billion barrels. The expected windfall presents both an opportunity and a risk: Ghana can extend its progress managing mineral wealth to the emerging oil sector, or it can fall prey to the many challenges and obstacles that have impeded economic progress and stability in places like Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea.

Revenue Watch and its partners were encouraged by Obama's message that Ghana must maintain "responsible individuals and responsible institutions," in order to prosper, and his acknowledgment that too often the West has approached Africa as "a source of resources rather than a partner." RWI director Karin Lissakers said the U.S. must work with Ghana not only to secure oil supply lines, but also to secure the well-being and economic participation of all who live there.

"Transparency and sound governance practices are a nation's best tools to build public trust and economic security," said Lissakers. "By choosing Ghana for his first official visit to Africa, President Obama is recognizing the country's commitment to proper governance and its desire to translate the coming oil windfall into successful economic development." Read more ...

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Secretary Clinton Calls for "Sunlight" in Africa

On August 5, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a strong call for transparency and accountability as part of her 11-day African tour. In remarks delivered at the Forum of the African Growth and Opportunity Act in Nairobi, Kenya, Clinton argued that economic development depends not only on responsible management of natural resource wealth, but also on cooperation between government, industry and civil society in pushing for better governance—a vision for cooperation that mirrors the multi-stakeholder approach advocated by the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative. 

Secretary Clinton's promotion of open and accountable government represents a new focus at the U.S. State Department, and what she called "a new era of transparency in government."

Revenue Watch commended the Secretary's explicit support of the transparency movement and her attention to "helping African nations to conserve their natural resources and reap fair benefits from them." But RWI also urged her to press forward and explore the specific needs and challenges of Africa's individual resource-rich nations, where different histories and governments create unique circumstances in the progress towards transparency. Read more …

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Civil Society Activists Face Repression in Africa

An increasing pattern of government harassment against transparency activists in Africa has raised alarm at Revenue Watch and among local partners and the international community. During the past several months, we have been deeply concerned over government crackdowns in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Niger. Added to Gabon's longstanding campaign against activist and RWI grantee Marc Ona, these incidents indicate a chilling trend for civil society and freedom of expression.

Golden Misabiko, a Congolese campaigner for transparency and human rights, was arrested on July 24 by the country's national intelligence office and charged with "undermining State security" and "making defamatory statements." He was detained for several weeks at the prosecutor's office, amid growing national and international calls for his release. Misabiko was finally released on bail on August 20 and transferred to a hospital with signs of deteriorated health.

The arrest was the latest act of government harassment against Misabiko following a report alleging corrupt mining practices and demanding public release of the new contract between the DRC and French nuclear power multinational AREVA. Misabiko is Chair of the African Association for the Protection of Human Rights (ASADHO) and a leader in the local Publish What You Pay coalition. In a press release, PWYP called for all charges against Misabiko to be dropped and for assurance that DRC civil society activists can freely campaign for transparency without fear of reprisals.

Harassment of civil society is not limited to the DRC, however. On August 12, security forces in Niger seized transparency activist and Publish What You Pay member Marou Amadou in Niamey. He is currently being held in a high-security prison where authorities continue to deny him medical attention despite reports of his declining health.

Shortly after Amadou's arrest, yet another Nigerien transparency activist, Wada Maman, was also arrested. Maman, a staff member of Transparency International and a PWYP member, was seized after protesting controversial changes in presidential term limits. He was held from August 22 through August 26 before being provisionally released, with charges including "participation in an unauthorized demonstration" still pending.

In response to Amadou's arrest and Niger's increasing harassment and intimidation of human rights and transparency activists, the civil society leadership of Niger's Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative announced their collective withdrawal from the EITI process until the Nigerien government provides both the unconditional release of Amadou and a greater guarantee of safety for the activist community.

LEARN MORE

• Revenue Watch Demands Release of Transparency Advocate Arrested by Congolese Security Agents
• Harassment of Activists Stalls EITI Process in Niger
  

Advocates for Accounting Reforms Prepare for Crucial Debate

This August, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) released a working draft of its new guidelines for extractive activities. Accounting standards regulate the information companies must publish in annual financial reports, including a company's property, payments, revenues, profits and losses. Reforms supported by Revenue Watch, PWYP and a community of transparency advocates would require that companies report key information, such as payments to governments, production, costs, reserves, key subsidiaries and properties, on a country-by-country basis. These disclosures would enable comparisons between countries and companies and create a powerful tool for citizen oversight of resource-dependent governments, as well as for companies, investors and tax authorities.

If successful, the proposed International Accounting Standards reforms would be applicable in more than 100 countries, including all of Europe, South Africa, Australia, Russia and China, meaning that any company registered or raising capital in these nations would be required or permitted to follow this rule, wherever they operated in the world. As a result, a company such as Shell (which is listed on the London Stock Exchange), would have to report this information for every country in which it operates, and citizens of these countries could determine what Shell is paying their government by reviewing the company's financial report. Other notable countries, including Canada, the U.S. and Brazil, are moving towards convergence with the IASB, rendering the new standards a practical global standard.

This is a crucial time for civil society to work with investors, as well as supportive companies, to continue building support for this reform. Read more ...

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Revenue Watch Joins "EITI Week" in Washington, D.C.

Leaders from the global transparency movement met in Washington, D.C., from May 11 through May 15. The week-long event, informally dubbed "EITI Week," was organized by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and the World Bank. Revenue Watch hosted and participated in workshops and seminars, and disseminated news from the conference with news articles and blog updates from staff as well as Revenue Watch chairman and EITI Board member Anthony Richter. The week culminated in the formal meeting of the EITI Board.

The week's events included a World Bank-hosted meeting on disaggregated revenue reporting; a roundtable on the opportunities for EITI to broaden its transparency agenda beyond national governments to also include sub-national regions; and an RWI strategic workshop on revenue transparency in the hydrocarbon transit and transportation sector, moderated by Richter and including panelists Jonas Moberg, head of the EITI Secretariat, Ingilab Ahkmedov of the Public Finance Monitoring Center in Azerbaijan, Willy Olsen, a former Senior Executive of Statoil, and numerous civil society experts from transit countries. Revenue Watch took the opportunity of the meeting to call upon policymakers in the United States and abroad to embrace the standards and principles of EITI. Read more ...

Revenue Watch Institute Applauds Gabonese Activist Marc Ona for International Environmental Prize

The Revenue Watch Institute congratulates its grantee and partner Marc Ona, the coordinator of the Publish What You Pay coalition in Gabon, for winning the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for 2009. The prize is awarded annually to grassroots environmental heroes on each of six continents. After undergoing a year of harassment from Gabonese authorities, "Marc Ona's courage as a campaigner for responsible resource management has helped the people of Gabon hold their government to account," said former Revenue Watch deputy director Julie McCarthy. "Revenue Watch and the entire global transparency movement are delighted to see his leadership recognized. Read more ...

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POLICY BRIEF: Can Ghana Avoid the Oil Curse?

Ghana stands at a crossroads: Its historic 2007 oil discovery is expected to create a windfall in an extractives sector dominated for centuries by gold mining. Improved transparency in oil revenue management will be critical if the country hopes to mitigate asymmetries of power, information and accountability across all the parties in its emerging oil sector.

Though much of Ghana's population lives in poverty, the country appears to have avoided some of the traditional "curses" associated with resource-rich, aid-dependent countries. In a policy briefing on resource revenue management in Ghana, Antoine Heuty of RWI and Andres Mejia Acosta of the Institute of Development Studies explore how domestic political factors may influence development outcomes through resource revenue management. Building on policy lessons from the management of Ghana's gold and cocoa, Heuty and Mejia Acosta analyze possible scenarios for sharing the windfall from the newly discovered oil resources. Download and read the full report ... (pdf, 62 KB)

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REPORT: The Case for Company-by-Company EITI Reporting

Since the inception of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the reporting method for company payments to governments has been one of the most contentious issues, specifically, whether disclosures should be made on a disaggregated, company-by-company basis or in aggregated form, without company-specific breakdowns.

In a Revenue Watch report published this July, author Sefton Darby lays out the most common arguments for an aggregated reporting standard, details the weaknesses of each assertion, and provides several rebuttals that civil society groups can use when presenting company-by-company reporting as the preferable alternative to both government and extractive industry officials. The report finds that not only is there little substance to many arguments in favor of aggregated reporting, but that a disaggregated approach shows clear benefits to EITI stakeholders. Read more and download the full report ... (pdf, 461KB)

COMMENTARY: To Succeed, an Iraqi National Oil Company Needs an Iraqi Oil Law

News from Iraq indicates that on July 28 the Cabinet agreed upon a bill establishing a new National Oil Company to help develop the country's petroleum and ramp up production to meet the government's pressing revenue needs. The details of the bill have not been released, but a strong commercial company with a clear mandate could be instrumental in the revitalization of Iraq's oil sector.

However, this enabling legislation cannot be a stand-alone action. A national company will be doomed to fail if it arrives unaccompanied by core laws to govern Iraq's oil sector. These long-debated laws continue to languish.

Since the fall of Saddam, Iraq's oil industry has been without a firm legal or institutional regime governing operation of the sector, revenue collection, or disbursements within the budget or across the country. This vacuum of policy hobbles Iraq's prospects for stability, prosperity and investment in essential public programs. Read more ...

COMMENTARY: Peruvian Democracy Agonizes at the Devil's Turn: Ongoing Strikes Place Industry and Indigenous Communities at Odds

This year Peru has witnessed several periods of sustained conflict, negotiations, and violence over controversial land use and development laws that threatened to strip away from the indigenous people any control over their own lands or natural resources. A massive strike in April and May included large rallies, pumping station shutdowns, and blockades of rivers, central roads and even regional airports. In response, the government imposed a state of emergency across the entire Amazon region, with some constitutional rights suspended and the Army and the Navy poised to intervene to restore order and maintain the flow of Peruvian oil. June saw the conflict turn deadly, with at least 34 people—police and protestors—killed. Despite the reduction in violence, the country remains highly polarized and its democratic institutions weakened.

In a two-part series, Carlos Monge, Claudia Viale and Leon Portocarrero of RWI Latin America provide vivid reports on both the continuing conflict and its historical context.  In 2007, Peruvian President Alan García set off national controversy with his statement that many Peruvians were not allowing the country to efficiently use its resources: a charge many analysts interpreted as a declaration of war against the small communal and individual producers who own most of the land in Peru.

Two months after the last dispute seemed to have cooled, the Peruvian Amazon is heating up again. In the south of Peru, a meeting of native leaders has decided to prevent Hunt Oil from starting exploration. In the north, where deadly violence erupted during the strike, indigenous organizations have denounced the ongoing dialogue as ineffective, and protested that "capture orders" have forced their leaders into hiding, and that the government has established inauthentic "indigenous organizations" to confuse the negotiations. In response, indigenous groups threaten to wage a new strike, closing their territories to everyone alien or perceived as enemy, including oil and mining companies. The new strike is likely to shut down the pipelines and expel a Canadian-funded mining company from the Aguajun Wambis lands.

LEARN MORE

• Peruvian Democracy Agonizes at the Devil's Turn: June 5th and June 17th, 2009—Same Actors, But a Very Different Script
• The Amazon's Indigenous Community Strikes to Protest Natural Resource Policies in Peru

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COMMENTARY: Tensions Ignite for Gazprom and Turkmenistan After Pipeline Explosion

In April, a pipeline explosion disrupted natural gas supplies from Turkmenistan to Russia, possibly because the state-controlled Russian company Gazprom had abruptly shut down the pipeline in response to shrinking European demand. The accident didn't just create a raucous diplomatic clash between Russia and Turkmenistan, it also underscored the massive financial challenges facing Gazprom, and the efforts of gas-rich Central Asian countries to diversify their markets beyond dependence on Russia.

RWI Senior Economist Akram Esanov investigates the story from two angles: both the falling demand facing troubled gas giant, Gazprom, and the dilemma before Turkmenistan, a former Soviet state seeking to break Gazprom's monopoly over its most marketable resource.

LEARN MORE

• Troubled Gas Giant
• Turkmenistan's Dilemma

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COMMENTARY: Halliburton Bribery Scandals Test Nigeria's "Zero-Tolerance" for Corruption

Halliburton and its former subsidiary KBR recently agreed to the largest corruption settlement ever paid by a U.S. company under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Their historic guilty plea is only the latest in a string of high-level bribery cases in Nigeria and around the globe involving major multinationals. In commentary from Nigeria, Revenue Watch's Dauda Garuba asks how Nigeria will respond, and whether it can honor its pledge of no tolerance for corruption. Read more ...

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LIBERIA: Milestone Transparency Measures Signed into Law

The Revenue Watch Institute applauds the Liberian government for its recent passage of the Liberian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative Act: the most thorough legislation of its kind in any resource-rich nation. The LEITI Act, which requires that all extractive payments due to the country are verified, accounted for and utilized for the benefit of Liberian citizens, builds on ongoing efforts to promote greater transparency and accountability in Liberia through disaggregated reporting and the disclosure and review of contracts. Read more ...

AZERBAIJAN: NGO Law Battle & Stealth Oil Deals

Citizen groups in Azerbaijan have decried two new state oil development contracts signed without public notice, in a reversal of years of commendable transparency in oil negotiations. The deals, which cover four oil fields, were made with a relatively unknown company and in the absence of the financial and training provisions that would normally benefit Azerbaijan in such an agreement. This backwards step ironically comes after the country's validation as the first state compliant with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Read more ... (Open Society Insitute-Azerbaijan)

On June 30, Azeri citizen groups won a crucial victory, when the Parliament set aside a raft of dangerous measures before its final vote on a new law regulating NGO activities. The proposals threatened the entire civil society community and would have directly affected local advocates fighting for extractive industry transparency. Read more ...

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AFGHANISTAN: Oil Bids Bode Well for Transparency

While Afghanistan prepared for its elections and debated U.S. troop levels, its Ministries of Mines and Finances continued to work quietly to improve governance and secure sources of long-term revenue for the country. This summer, the Afghan Ministry of Mines accepted bids on three oil and gas blocks in Afghanistan. While these fields won't bring windfall revenues to Afghanistan, Afghanistan's open and public process of auctioning these fields nonetheless represents the government's resolve to promote transparency and accountability. Read more ...

INDONESIA: Announcement Expected on EITI Plans

Indonesia will likely soon announce their intention to implement the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, beginning with a Presidential Regulation, "Implementation of Transparency in State and Regional Revenue from the Extractive Industries," that will control how state revenue from the mining sector is reported. A translated report from Jakarta has more information. Read more ...

The first National Meeting of the Publish What You Pay-Indonesia coalition was held in Jakarta this August. Although the coalition was established in November 2007, due to organizational difficulties there had not yet been a national meeting of the group to establish a formal governance structure—something which has become a necessity as the coalition has grown—and to discuss varied responses to notes from PWYP-Indonesia's 2007 workshop on coalition positioning and work structure. Other members offered critiques of the overall performance of the coalition. 

With such important issues to the future of the organization under discussion, the convocators and national coordinator firmly desired broad membership participation in the hopes of building a stronger governance structure, advocacy agenda, and campaign strategies. Twenty-eight members of PWYP-Indonesia (nearly all of the coalition's 34 active members) traveled to Jakarta from across the country to attend the meeting, where they adopted a coalition statute and position paper and elected the first Board of Directors, consisting of five representatives and the reelected national coordinator. Read more ...

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TIMOR LESTE: Workshops Discuss EITI Reports, Dissemination, and Validation

This June, Revenue Watch Institute worked with the Timor Leste Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative Secretariat and the East Timor NGO Forum (FONGTIL) to implement a series of trainings on EITI for civil society, the multi-stakeholder working group and parliamentarians.

Facilitated by Revenue Watch Asia-Pacific Regional Coordinator Chandra Kirana, Radhika Sarin, Coordinator of Publish What You Pay (PWYP) International, and other civil society representatives, the workshops drew 56 participants to learn about the EITI and analyze the experience of other countries, such as Kazakhstan and Liberia, that have already undergone the process.

The training was opened by Timor Leste Secretary of State Alfredo Pires and FONGTIL Chair Dinorah Granadeiro, who emphasized the importance of civil society organizations in Timor Leste's EITI process, both in distributing information to grassroots activists and relaying the concerns of citizens in remote regions to the MSG and national government. As many of the workshop participants had not participated in EITI processes before, and had limited knowledge of the initiative, the first morning session began with an introduction from Manuel de Lemos, of the National EITI Secretariat, regarding the EITI and its implementation outlook in Timor Leste.

The civil society sessions were designed to help organizations understand what to expect and how to respond to an EITI report, to identify who should know about the EITI report findings and plan an effective dissemination strategy; and become familiar with the validation criteria and processes. In evaluations, participants expressed appreciation for the training, writing that the workshop would help improve the quality of civil society monitoring of EITI implementation and ensure a "transparent and credible follow-up process for our first EITI report." Read more ...