The Executive Director of the Chamber of Petroleum Consumers (COPEC), Duncan Amoah, has criticised Ghana’s oil policy direction, warning that exporting crude oil only to import finished petroleum products is eroding national economic sovereignty. Speaking at the 2025 Citi Business Forum, Amoah lamented that Ghana’s failure to integrate its oil value chain is draining the economy and benefiting foreign nations at the expense of its citizens.
“It’s sickening,” Amoah stated, “If as a country with hydrocarbons, we can’t integrate the upstream, midstream, and downstream to give our people a competitive advantage, then I don’t know what we’re doing.”
Amoah highlighted the paradox of Ghana’s oil industry, where the country spends a staggering $400 million monthly on fuel imports despite being a crude oil producer. “You produce all the hydrocarbons here, you allow the IOCs to ship everything back to the UK, to Holland. They refine and then midstream, we take $400 million every single month to import the refined product back into the country… Eventually, we’re building their economies for them.”
Amoah called for a bold policy overhaul, advocating for the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) to spearhead domestic oil development, focusing on local refining to drive job creation, improve pricing autonomy, and reduce pressure on the local currency. “I’d be happy for a day to come when a leader says we’re going to use GNPC to spearhead an oil discovery, we’ll keep that bloc, refine locally at TOR, and build other refineries so that more people can get jobs.”
Amoah argued that Ghana’s current petroleum trade model undermines the cedi and burdens consumers. “We chase them with the dollar that we don’t have or don’t mint to buy the finished product, then we come back and decide the local currency is bad, so we should add more to it so that people will pay more.”
He emphasized the need for accountability in economic management, invoking religious law: “For me personally, Sharia law or the Mosaic law must apply to our leadership.”
