The newspaper cited a recent presentation Amoako-Tuffuor  made, wherein he noted that Ghana will earn from direct and indirect sources such as royalties, corporate income tax, dividends, additional income tax, surface rental and carried interest.

Since the discovery of oil in commercial quantity was announced in Ghana in 2007, many Ghanaians have focused on how much money the nation will make. One estimate even approximated that every citizen will get 17 pesewas when the amount is shared among all Ghanaians.

With the country’s current GDP at well over $18 billion, Dr Oteng-Adjei said the total revenue to the government and the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) in respect of royalties, income tax and interest payment on oil and gas exploration would be $1 billion per annum, at an average crude oil price of $60 per barrel.

And thats not all - the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Edmark International, Mr. Sam Low Ban Chai has indicated that Ghana abounds in huge investment opportunities which could be explored by all potential investors.

According to Mr. Low, Edmark International is poised to use Ghana as platform and a gateway to Africa, to help create wealth among the people in the region.

The CEO of Edmark International was speaking at a press launch of the company’s products, as well as its first International convention dubbed “One Edmark, One Africa”, in Accra last Friday.

Mr. Low noted that the people of Ghana have demonstrated that if given the opportunity they can turn things around. He said that his company would complement efforts at creating equal opportunity for everyone to explore. He disclosed the company’s city project, which is aimed at expanding the operational base of the company in the country.

The General Manager of Edmark Ghana, Hajj Awal, observed that the company is making head way on the Ghanaian market due to the positive attitude being exhibited by the staff and distributors.

Though we must monitor governance in this newfound economic climate with an acute microscope, it is clear that there is incredible potential for free enterprise to flourish throughout Africa, if governance takes steps towards transparency similar to that of Ghana.

“We have always related better with the British through the Conservatives than Labour,” Zimbabwe’s president said today. “Conservatives are bold, [Tony] Blair and [Gordon] Brown run away when they see me, but not these fools, they know how to relate to others.”

If David Cameron relates to others like Robert Mugabe relates to others, I fret for Britain.

The near-90-year-old President fell out with the British government when, under his land reforms, he encouraged Zimbabweans to seize the farms of British descendants. After Mugabe was accused of rigging the 2002 election, Blair imposed sanctions on the Zimbabwean leader and some of his associates, banning their travel and freezing their bank accounts.

Today Brown restated the British government’s position telling the visiting South African president Jacob Zuma, involved in brokering Zimbabwe’s unity accord, that the sanctions would not be lifted

Speaking in Zimbabwe after hearing of Brown’s comments to Zuma, Mugabe said: “We have a better chance with David Cameron than with Brown.” Margaret Thatcher’s government presided over independence for then Rhodesia in 1980.

This isn’t the first time Mugabe has used harsh language; the Guardian’s Allegra Stratton went on to document that in 1999 , the President stated that Blair was a “little man” for refusing to honour commitments made by Conservative governments to help fund Zimbabwe’s land reforms.

Mr. Jong-Il’s endorsement has yet to be accounted for, but we’ll keep you updated.

This occurs parallel to the uncoordinated political agenda we see today from Kenya, stifling continued investment and hindering Kenya from moving on. Instead of focusing on the real issues, politicians in the region are collating their public relations teams and preparing their respective campaigns for the upcoming 2012 election. How it will end any differently is anyone’s guess.

This year should be one of effective constitutional reform, not an atrocious repeat. Below, Gladwell Otieno from the Africa Centre for Open Governance argues that politicians in Kenya today are merely going through the motions of reform, all while ‘avoiding accountability for the disasters they have repeatedly visited on the country’.

Commissions of inquiry reported on the violence and the elections. The Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission is gearing up an an interim electoral commission has replaced a discredited old one. Leading politicians, who have reason to believe their names are on it, are very worried as they contemplate the possibility of being held to account. Their increasingly desperate and erratic stratagems have careened from intense horse-trading in parliament to sabotaging the local tribunal, to trying to stop the looming prospect of ICC engagement.

Intimidation of political witnesses proceeds apace, with at least two killed so far. The state, whose security agents were implicated in the violence, has offered no protection to potential witnesses. Civil society, with donor support, has had to step in.

…Thousands wary of Kenya’s history of impunity for large-scale crimes committed in the pursuit of power and its lucrative benefits are voting with their feet, moving their families and investents away from contested areas in fear of the fires of ‘next time’.

It is in this light that the latest electoral news hit the wires – Venezuela’s highest court on Wednesday annulled the election of an opposition mayor, replacing him with a supporter of President Hugo Chavez until a new vote is held.

The Supreme Court threw out the 2008 election of Jorge Barboza, mayor of the Sucre municipality in western Zulia state, on grounds that he failed to pay $292 in local taxes.

The justices ruled Barboza was ineligible to continue as mayor because he lacked “the suitability (required) for the management of a mayoral post.”

In brief comments on the local Globovision television channel, Barboza called the ruling a coup against a democratically elected official and denied any wrongdoing.

His brother, Omar Barboza, said the arguments behind the ruling “constitute proof that the justice system is being used to politically persecute opponents” of Chavez’s socialist government.

Barboza said the owner of a house rented by the mayor apparently failed to pay the $292 in taxes. He called the court’s ruling ridiculous, saying his brother should not be held responsible for the home owner’s lack of responsibility.

The Supreme Court appointed Humberto Franka Salas, a member of Chavez’s ruling party, as interim mayor. Franka Salas, who was runner-up in the 2008 mayoral vote, will hold the post until a new election.

Chavez foes have long accused the president of using judges and prosecutors to bring trumped up criminal charges against government opponents. International rights groups have criticized the lack of independence of Venezuela’s judiciary, noting that Chavez appears to hold sway over the system.

The Organisation of American States (OAS) recently accused Chávez of endangering democracy, intimidating opponents and curbing freedom of speech in Venezuela.

In a 319-page report published this week, the body’s human rights branch – the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights – painted an alarming picture of repression and intolerance in Venezuela.

“The commission finds that the state’s punitive power is being used to intimidate or punish people on account of their political opinions,” it said. “Venezuela lacks the conditions necessary for human rights defenders and journalists to carry out their work freely.”

The report went on to document the “troubling trend” of harassment, violence and judicial action to deter and criminalise protests, leaving Venezuelans cowed.

It detailed cases of dozens of judges who were sacked or sidelined for issuing rulings the government did not like. “The lack of judicial independence and autonomy vis-á-vis political power is one of the weakest points in Venezuelan democracy.”

Chavez rejects the allegations, saying he has never pressured judges or prosecutors to target his adversaries.

Perth-based junior Troy Resources has unfortunately lost up to $2.23 million worth of gold in a robbery at its Andorinhas mine in Brazil, the company announced yesterday.

Security has been a consistent worry for Troy employees operating in the region. According to a Troy spokesman, in this instance a group of armed robbers took three employees hostage on the road leaving the mine before returning to the Andorinhas site where approximately 2,000 ounces of gold doré was taken.

The hostages were then released unharmed.

Troy chief executive Paul Benson called the robbery “disturbing” but was sure to put the event into perspective. “Most importantly, all of our employees were released unharmed,” he said. “The safety and welfare of our employees is our absolute highest priority.”

The company said that the loss is fully covered by insurance and the matter is being investigated
by local police. “We are co-operating with the relevant authorities and will update the market when we
receive a final report,” Benson said.

At a recent lunch presentation attended by MINING DAILY, Troy chairman John Dow admitted to journalists that operating in areas such as South America comes with inherent risks including corruption and political unrest.

He said that these factors are part of the business and need to be handled correctly. “It is worth the hassle,” he said. “You have got to go where the gold is.”

Marian Tupy is a policy analyst at the CATO Institute in Washington DC with a unique interest in Zimbabwean affairs. He, along with many of our readers and indeed writers, was horrified while watching images emanating from Zimbabwe covering the cholera outbreak, and was baffled as to why it wasn’t nipped in the bud at the first sign of danger.

In the article below, excerpted from the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Tupy documents how one man sought to hold those accountable for the spread of the unprecedented epidemic in Zimbabwe, attempted to raise awareness at those initial stages and how for his efforts, had his very career put at risk.  Today’s dispute tribunal being held Nairobi will hope to raise international awareness to the efforts of Dr. Tadonki, whose pro-bono council is CFP Founder Robert Amsterdam.

Over the last 10 years, Robert Mugabe’s government has destroyed Zimbabwe’s economy and eviscerated freedom in the country. In addition to the many victims of state-sponsored violence, hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of avoidable hunger and sickness.

Yet most African leaders either passively watched or actively supported the criminal regime in Harare. A trial that will start today in Kenya may show that the U.N. has also betrayed the people of Zimbabwe by cozying up to the dictator and hiding the truth about one of the worst episodes in that African country.

Georges Tadonki, who heads the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Harare, alleges that the top U.N. official in Zimbabwe at the time knowingly ignored the 2008 cholera outbreak in the country. By the time the U.N. finally intervened in late December 2008, Mr. Tadonki told the press, there were already “over 4,000 deaths, more than 100,000 people sick of cholera and millions [of] people affected directly or indirectly not only in Zimbabwe, but also in neighboring South Africa, Zambia, and Mozambique.”

According to Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute, “the mortality rate was at least four times, maybe five times, higher than one would expect—even allowing for the parlous state of the Zimbabwean health-care system. The mortality rate was similar to the outbreaks before the discovery of the transmission process in mid-19th century.”

The crisis started when the Mugabe government nationalized Zimbabwe’s water supply in 2005 but soon ran out of money to maintain the infrastructure and treat the water with sodium sulfate. In 2008 the government shut down the water supply altogether, reducing the people in the urban areas to scavenge for water in ponds and sewers. Since the Zimbabwean health-care system collapsed along with the rest of the economy, the U.N. effectively became responsible for providing the necessary aid to tackle the emerging health crisis.

However, Mr. Tadonki says that Agostinho Zacarias, who headed the overall U.N. mission in Zimbabwe at the time and was since promoted to another U.N. position, refused to give the go-ahead for anti-cholera measures even though Mr. Tadonki and his staff advised him that an outbreak of the disease was very likely. Moreover, Mr. Tadonki says, the U.N. made only minimal efforts to galvanize the international assistance needed to arrest the spread of the disease between its outbreak in August 2008 and early December 2008. Those four months were crucial because cholera is highly contagious, has an incubation period between one and two days and can kill soon afterwards.

Mr. Tadonki claims that the U.N.’s refusal to rapidly move on cholera was not simple negligence but politically motivated. According to Mr. Tadonki, the U.N. didn’t want to anger the host government, which was trying to convince the world in general and Africa in particular that all was well in Zimbabwe. The government’s official line—spelled out by Mugabe as late as December 2008—was that there was “no cholera.” According to Mr. Tadonki, his former superior, Mr. Zacarias, aligned the U.N. “behind a humanitarian situation analysis ‘acceptable’ to [the] government.”

The U.N. rewarded Mr. Tadonki’s criticism with a threat of dismissal, which prompted him to sue the U.N. for harassment at the U.N. Dispute Tribunal in Nairobi, Kenya. International lawyer Robert Amsterdam, famous for defending the Russian political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is Mr. Tadonki’s pro-bono legal counsel.

Did the UN fail to fulfill its mission to protect the people of Zimbabwe out of political considerations? Did it make matters worse by refusing to acknowledge the outbreak of the epidemic? Those are some of the questions that the trial may soon answer.

I just find it alarming that we’re celebrating after a year of systematic destruction to your government’s infrastructure. I find it frightening that you are so jubilant this soon after knowingly passing an ‘indigenization‘ bill that would deter not only fresh investment to an already heavily-sanctioned Zimbabwe but stifle continued investment. Far worse, I find it ominous that cake this year will be served at China’s embassy.

In an act of unabashed ‘foreign policy‘, China’s Foreign Ministry stated today that its embassy in Zimbabwe had thrown a birthday party for the now 86-year old President Robert Mugabe.

I use quotations around foreign policy, because at this point in documenting China’s strategic investment in Africa, how they’re doing so is laughable if it weren’t so sad, sad although frankly economically beneficial for the rising superpower-China regularly wields a no-strings attached integration opportunity for African nations,building roads and sending concessional loans to parts of the world notorious for rampant corruption and persisting human rights abuses. Beijing and Chinese companies have pledged tens of billions of dollars to Africa in loans and investments, mostly to secure raw materials for the world’s fastest-growing major economy. This latest symbolic gesture of good faith in a leader so ostentatiously selfish is yet another cliched modus operandi for Hu Jintao’s waking giant.

Hailed as a savior by fanatical (many claimed brainwashed) supporters and praised throughout Africa for standing up to what many see as bullying by the West, Mugabe is hated in equal measure by opponents who accuse him of being a dictator. A President who was elected with 20% of the popular vote isn’t really a President, after all.

Mugabe “thanked the Chinese embassy for its painstaking preparations for the birthday celebration and … hoped to further expand friendly cooperative relations in every field between the two nations”, the foreign ministry said.

The ministry’s website (www.mfa.gov.cn) showed pictures of Mugabe cutting a birthday cake in front of a large sign wishing him “Happy 86th birthday” and addressing almost 100 guests. It quoted Zimbabwean Foreign Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi as saying it was the first time Mugabe had visited a foreign embassy in the country since independence in 1980.

“This proves the special friendly relations between the two countries,” the statement paraphrased the minister as saying. Special but not unique.

Mugabe of course denies charges of human rights abuses and insists the West has withheld aid mainly in protest over his controversial seizure of white-owned commercial farms for resettlement among blacks. Mugabe has tried to boost economic ties with Asian countries such as China and Malaysia.

China often counters the stigma over its newfound foreign policy regarding Africa that its pledge not to interfere in any country’s internal affairs is welcomed by African nations. But its those welcoming voices that China refers to that worry me. Because those voices are promising change and accomplishing it without lifting so much as a finger, and effortlessly pushing the thousands, perhaps millions on the continent suffering under the will of authoritarian regimes, to the wayside.

Whatever the constitutional doubts that remain, the resolution passed on the 9th of February by the National Assembly, citing the appropriately titled ‘doctrine of necessity’, to recognise Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan as Acting President was warmly welcomed by Nigerians who had watched the country teeter for over 70 days.Many can chalk the instability to the health concerns of Yar’Adua, whose unfortunate bout with near-kidney failure has stirred the political pot as to who shall succeed him.

A deciding factor was Jonathan’s own base in the Niger Delta: the prospect of a return to widespread militant attacks against oil installations there in protest at the blocking of his political elevation was enough to convince most of the political class that it was time to suspend Umaru Yar’Adua’s attempts at ruling from a hospital ward in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The head of the former rebel New Forces (FN), Guillaume Soro, whom Gbagbo reappointed as prime minister, arrived in the political capital Yamoussoukro for talks with the head of state.

Since Gbagbo caused an outcry Friday by dissolving the government and sacking the head of the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI), the main question has been whether the opposition will take part in Soro’s new team.

Soro has been consulting with both Gbagbo and the main opposition coalition, the Rally of Houphouetists for Democracy and Peace (RHDP), which has demanded the reinstatement of the vote commission if it is to take part in government.

“Our position hasn’t changed,” RHDP spokesman Alphonse Djedje Mady told the Associated Free Press today, stating that no progress had been made in his view.

Gbagbo’s decision after a spat with the electoral commission over voter registration is certain to delay yet again a presidential poll that was scheduled for early March.

Frustration is growing at years of delays to a vote meant to restore peace to West Africa’s former economic hub after a 2002-3 war divided it between Gbagbo’s government and rebels.

The opposition has called for big street protests, raising the specter of violence in the world’s top cocoa grower, though protests have thus far remained peaceful.

In the main city of Abidjan however, a protester seized and set fire to a bus belonging to a national transport company.

“A vandal amongst the bus passengers sprayed the bus with flammable liquid,” said Thomas Koffi, the transport manager.

“Ever since the president’s decision … we’ve been confronted by these acts of vandalism.”

The opposition suspects that Gbagbo wants to take control of the electoral commission, dominated by his opponents until he dissolved it and sacked its president, Robert Beugre Mambe, who was accused of fraud in the voters’ roll. The RHDP’s youth movement, which announced the protest marches of the past few days, warned that opposition in the streets to Gbagbo’s dual dissolutions will mount at the weekend.

New demonstrations took place on Thursday, after scuffles and arrests on Wednesday in Yamoussoukro.

At Bouake, the FN stronghold in central Ivory Coast, more than 1,000 people blocked off the main street with pieces of wood and burning tyres, while some protesters vandalised shops.

“We don’t want Gbagbo,” marchers shouted.

Other opposition rallies took place in the region at Beoumi and Sakassou. In Sakassou, demonstrators clashed with police, residents said.

Gbagbo’s supporters have accused the opposition of “acts of sabotage.”

Soro’s new team will be tasked with leading the country to presidential elections, which have six times been postponed since Gbagbo’s mandate expired in 2005.

In a Reuters interview in London, the head of the London Club group of commercial creditors, Thierry Desjardins, said a lack of effective government in Ivory Coast could delay a restructuring of 2.2 billion euros of debt that was meant to be exchanged by April.

Despite the civil war and years of subsequent crisis, cocoa in Ivory Coast has not yet seriously been disrupted.

“We are in agreement,” Mugabe told reporters after a tourism conference in Harare. “We are all agreed that the sanctions must go.”

Mugabe has long claimed the heavy sanctions imposed from the United States and the EU to be forms of ‘economic terrorism’. Today, his jargon at an all-time low, he strategically sought to include his erstwhile rival Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and the unity government formed nearly a year ago.

But EU leaders on Tuesday cited a lack of progress in implementing the power-sharing agreement. Their referencing the lack of political re-construction is not unwarranted. It has been very apparent that the ruthless authoritarian will not leave the executive office quietly, nor will he share power. Instead, he will prove to the international community that a shared government is a dysfunctional government.

The 27-member bloc said travel bans and asset freezes against Mugabe and about 100 of his cohorts would be extended for another 12 months, but the names of six individuals and nine companies were removed from the sanctions list.

Mugabe said he was not surprised by the EU decision.

“We know their attitude. They don’t want anyone, any country in the developing world, to make any meaningful developmental strides,” Mugabe said.

“That attitude is more pronounced even in regard to Zimbabwe. We have resources which they envy, natural resources that belong to us. There is the issue of land here. When they make those noises it is because they have lost that which they occupied illegally, which is now in our possession.“

Relations between Zimbabwe and the European Union were strained nearly 10 years ago by polls marred by violence and widespread allegations of human rights abuses by Mugabe’s government, often tied to a chaotic land reform programme.