The Institute of Financial and Economic Journalists (IFEJ) has called on the government to withdraw the Petroleum Revenue Management and the Petroleum Exploration and Production Bills from Parliament for further and broader public consultation and fine-tuning to make them more responsive to Ghana's development challenges. According to the institute, the country must be able to draw and implement a long-term national development plan and strategy to guide its oil revenue expenditure. At the end of a two-day seminar on the petroleum industry, the institute recommended that explicit fiscal disciplinary measures should be introduced in the management of revenue from the oil and gas sector and called on the government to diversify the economy and invest in agriculture and other productive sectors of the economy to create employment. The two-day seminar, which was sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Stifung, was on the theme "Understanding oil and gas governance" Some of the topics treated included the political economy of oil and gas extraction: a blessing or curse? The petroleum exploration and production bill and local content policy; Ghana's emerging oil economy and national development; Bidding, contracting and fiscal regime in oil and gas business; The oil and gas sectors and the labour market in Ghana; and Oil and gas governance: EITI process and the management of public expectations. In a Communique issued in Accra, the institute called on the government to implement the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) disclosure of terms of contracts and profit sharing arrangements and pointed out that half of all revenue from the oil and gas sector be spent on capital investment while 30 per cent be spent on recurrent expenditure and the remaining 20 per cent put into savings fund. The communique also called for a time frame to be stated in the bill for the establishment of the independent Petroleum Authority. The communique stated that licensing and awarding of new exploration and production companies be suspended in order to avoid undue speculation until all regulatory frameworks are put in place and cost oversight provisions introduced in the bill. The institute also called for the strengthening of the Environmental Protection Agency to ensure that companies strictly complied with all environmental guidelines while an environment fund to deal with environmental issues should be set up. The government, in response to concerns of frontline communities, should establish a development framework similar to the Savanna Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) for the Western Region and undertake to build the capacities of people from the region to participate in the oil and gas sector. The scope of EITI be broadened to cover the entire value chain of the oil and gas sector to help manage public expectations. The institute called on Parliament to adopt a bipartisan and objective approach to debating all bills intended to regulate the oil and gas sector to ensure that the nation maximise its benefits from the sector. Source Daily Graphic