Ghana in Oil Deal with CNOOC

allAfrica reports that the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation have started a collaboration on offshore oil exploration. The article is a bit short on the details of what this collaboration would entail, but I am a bit concerned about this deal from a governance and transparency perspective, given China's oil dealings in other, less well governed African states. Though, to be fair, this is not a concern solely applicable to Chinese oil firms.

I get the feeling from this article that President Mills is attempting to soften the energy crisis by creating these domestic oil deals. Doing so for populist reasons would be bad; I doubt that Ghana yet has the institutional capacity to manage such windfall oil revenues well. Though I have noticed that many young Ghanaian graduates, who are suffering through a terrible job-hunting process, especially with public-sector hiring frozen, are looking into graduate programs in Norway, a country that did a fairly decent job managing its oil revenues. Hopefully they can bring back some lessons from there.

I'll look further into this deal over the next few days.