Dear Editor,
GIVEN the recent comments on EITI progress by the Ministry of Finance, it is clear the details of the Exxon agreement should be available for public scrutiny. An exploration agreement should be separate from an extraction and a possible processing agreement.
Prior to the execution of an extraction agreement an estimate on Demand and sourced Supply for the local economy should be forecasted with multiple scenarios and the sustainability strategy that it enables needs to be finalised. These prudent steps will enable the government to make estimates of revenue generation from over capacity sales from the sector and associated savings to the national budget. This will also be informative to adjacent sectors and help lay plans for their development.
As for the subsequent execution of an extraction agreement, an open bid process should be implemented to allow for public scrutiny and parliamentary debate that is clearly tied to a long term sustainability strategy. The same should go for any subsequent processing contracts.
The financing of any processing centre should be both parts of the processing agreement and the government’s environmental protection strategy and near term agenda. This is essential, given the current state of development in the bauxite mining industry’s environmental safeguards for the affected local population. In recent years some residents have shown the effects of long term exposure to unhealthy environmental conditions created by the extraction of natural resources for the generation of national income. This income is also supposed to ensure the effective execution of a safe environmental policy and the partners used in the sector are supposed to also be sourced based on their proven internal capability to provide the implementation of a strong environmental protection strategy and good human rights record. Maybe this would have prevented the labour strike in Linden over poor bauxite industry working conditions.
Regards,
Jamil Changlee