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Komenda sugar factory: Mahama constructed the roof before building foundation, says Akufo-Addo

President Akufo-Addo has lashed out at John Mahama for building the Komenda sugar factory without factoring in a source of raw materials

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has said the decision taken by his immediate 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 saying you are going to start from the roof, before you have a foundation. How does the house get built? You going to start from the roof, when you haven’t built the foundation?” President Akufo-Addo asked.

According to the president, “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, 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 producing your production, those inputs are there.”

But this, he said, is not Mahama’s way of doing things, because: “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.”

“I knew what the vision was”

The president made these comments on Monday (18 October) during an interview on Eagle FM, at the start of his two-day working visit to the Central Region. The remarks were a response to comments made by the former president last Friday.

It will be recalled that in an interview on Cape FM, the former president Mahama stated: “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”, despite having not set up a single sugarcane plantation to serve as a raw material source for the factory.

Information from an October 2017 technical audit team, made up of experts from academia and industry, as well as independent sugarcane consultants, showed that a test run was never completed before the Komenda sugar factory was commissioned in May 2016, due to the non-availability of sufficient sugarcane for a test run.

In addition, the factory, on commissioning, was not in a position to produce the required refined sulphurless white sugar, because of the absence of 35 component parts/units which were not fully installed before the test run. This included equipment for melt clarification, vertical crystallisers, a molasses weighing system, a bagasse compressor and a dosing system.

The effluent treatment plant had also not been built at the time of the commissioning.

President Akufo-Addo also revealed that a preliminary assessment of the factorys value showed that the factory had been overvalued to the tune of some US$12 million. The report of a forensic audit has been submitted to the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO).

EOCO has since then written to Office of the Attorney General and Ministry of Justice to conduct further investigations towards a possible prosecution.

Revival plan

Towards the revival of the factory, the president revealed that a strategic investor, Park Agrotech Ghana Ltd, 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 (Pricewaterhouse) and the strategic investor has 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 being given the required notice, terminated the negotiations with the strategic investor on 1 September 2021 for failing to fulfil the conditions precedent to the offer made to them.

The president indicated that the services of a technical partner with expertise in the sugar industry has been engaged to manage the technical operations of the factory. In addition, traditional rulers in Komenda and the adjoining districts have been engaged to acquire large tracts of land to plant sugarcane.

President Akufo-Addo sad he expects that the Komenda sugar factory will commence commercial production in the first quarter of 2022.

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