President Akufo-Addo
President Akufo-Addo, says the decision taken by his predecessor, John Dramani Mahama, to build the Komenda Sugar Factory, without first establishing a sugarcane plantation, betrays every principle of construction.
“It is like building a house, and say you are going to start from the roof, before you have a foundation. How does the house get built? You are going to start from the roof, when you haven’t built the foundation?” President Akufo-Addo fired on Eagle FM in Cape Coast at the commencement of his two-day working visit to the Central Region.
The President was responding directly to comments by former President Mahama last Friday that the current government was deliberately failing to operationalise the Komenda Sugar Factory.
Mr. Mahama had said “the Indian government offered to assist us with the project. We were to set up the factory first and later apply for a $24 million support for sugar cultivation from the Indian government. When this current government was elected, they indicated that the project was not among their priorities. Therefore, they didn’t apply for the funds,” he said.
Not Foolish
He admitted he built the facility before going to look for funds to plant the sugar cane to feed the factory and justified it by even going to the extent of insulting himself.
“I’m not that foolish to set up a factory and have no plan for the provision of raw materials. I knew what the vision was. It was to get the raw materials first, and when we start production, we would have already had a processing plant,” Mr. Mahama had said.
Interestingly, the factory was shut down the very day the same President Mahama opened it in 2016 and the explanation was that they were going to do some maintenance works.
NDC Propaganda
On the day of the commissioning, the NDC even bought sugar and brought it to the factory, claiming it was a product from the factory, and made the journalists they sponsored at the fanfare to pretend to taste the sugar from the factory.
Minister of Communications at the time, Dr. Edward Omane Boamah, was even captured on front pages of state-owned newspapers tasting what they claimed to be sugar from the factory, and media personalities like Captain Smart run commentaries that the factory was working.
Reacting to Mr. Mahama’s tantrums, President Akufo-Addo said yesterday “you would think that every industrial activity would begin with, first of all, what you want to do, what you want to produce. Once you identify that, then clearly, your next step has to be what are the inputs,” adding “what are the things that you need to be able to feed into your factory, to get to your outputs and you are therefore to be satisfied when you start your production, those inputs are there.”
But this, he said, is not John Mahama’s way of doing things, as “he will rather build the roof, once the roof has been built then he will come down and then build the foundation. You know that a house built on that principle will collapse, just as Komenda collapsed.”
Komenda Report
Information from an October 2017 Technical Audit Team, made up of experts from the academia, industry, and independent sugarcane consultants, revealed that a test run was never completed before the Komenda Sugar Factory was commissioned in May 2016, due to the unavailability of sufficient sugarcane for the test run.
In addition, the factory, on commissioning, was not in a position to produce the required refined sulphurless white sugar due to the absence of 35 component parts/units, which were not fully installed before the test run, including for melt clarification, vertical crystallisers, molasses weighing system, bagasse compressor and a dosing system. The Effluent Treatment Plant had also not been constructed at the time of the commissioning.
President Akufo-Addo also revealed that a preliminary assessment on the value of the factory revealed that the factory had been over valued to the tune of some US$12 million. The report of a Forensic Audit has been submitted to EOCO, which has since then written to Office of the Attorney General and Ministry of Justice to conduct further investigations for possible prosecution.
Revival Plan
Towards the revival of the factory, the President revealed that a Strategic Investor, Park Agrotech Ghana Limited, had been selected as the preferred Strategic Investor for the Komenda Sugar Factory, and their recommendation was approved by Cabinet.
However, negotiations between the Transaction Advisor (Price Water House) and the Strategic Investor have been unduly prolonged due to a number of demands made by the Strategic Investor, as well as the effects of the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic, which restricted consultations between the investor and the Transaction Advisor.
With the delays in concluding negotiations between the Transaction Advisor and the Strategic Investor, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, after given the required notice, terminated the negotiations with the Strategic Investor on September 1, 2021 for their failure to fulfil the conditions precedent to the offer made to them.
The President indicated that the services of the Technical Partner with expertise in the sugar industry has been engaged to manage the technical operations of the factory. In addition, traditional authorities in Komenda and the adjoining districts have been engaged to acquire large tracts of land for sugarcane plantation.
President Akufo-Addo was expectant that the Komenda Sugar Factory will commence commercial production in the first quarter of 2022.