Sudan's newly appointed Minister of Petroleum Lual Achuil Deng said he will soon start "an era of transparency" aimed at resolving years of disputes between northern and southern Sudanese over production from the country's oil wells.
"We will put everything on the internet, for the Southerners, the Northerners, and the rest of the world to verify. We will put up daily production figures and daily revenue figures," Deng said in an interview with the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat.
Responding to accusations that some Southerners accuse the Northern government of cheating the South out of its share of oil revenues, Deng stated that his own policy would be to start publishing figures regarding the daily oil output.
Independent audit
"I hope to comfort all the Sudanese by stating that there will now be transparency, even if it did not exist in the past," Deng said. The audit, he said, will look at oil production since 2005 and will be conducted by an independent firm.
Deng also commented on the international nongovernmental organization, Global Witness, which last year claimed that $6 billion that was supposed to go the South was missing. "I don't think this is true," said Deng, "and you can ask Global Witness."
Deng went on to say that Global Witness had recently participated in a landmark transparency seminar in Khartoum, which the Sudanese government organized. "Global Witness said it was impressed by the openness with which all sides participated in the event," according to Deng.
"They [Global Witness] emphasized that the discrepancies uncovered did not mean that $6 billion, but only about 10% (about $600 million)" had gone missing said Deng. "Anyway, I assured them of my new policy of transparency."
But Global Witness is not assured, Indeed, the group issued a statement within days of Deng's interview denying that it had retracted any previous statements about missing revenues or was no longer concerned about the accuracy of the country's oil revenue figures.
Global Witness acknowledged that "very important commitments" on improving transparency had been made by the Sudanese government. Yet the group insisted that the full disclosure of oil revenue data and the results of an independent audit remain necessary to prove the concerns were unfounded.
Gavin Hayman, Global Witness campaigns director, welcomed the government of Sudan's public commitments "to provide more oil revenue data and to complete an independent audit of the oil sector."
But Hayman also insisted that, "until these things actually happen we, and more importantly the citizens of Sudan, will remain unable to trust that the wealth-sharing agreement is being implemented fairly."
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