The Minister of Trade and Industry, Alan Kyerematen, has been accused of selling 125 acres of the Komenda sugarcane farm, which was meant to produce the raw material for the sugar factory, to local spirit (akpeteshie) distillers.
The Minister was accused by the former member and secretary to the Komenda Sugar Project Management Board, Ransford Chatman Vanni-Amoah.
According to Vanni-Amoah, before a loan of US$125 million was approved by parliament in connection with the project, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, acting on behalf of the government of Ghana, “entered into an agreement with Seftech India Private Ltd to pre-finance the development of a 125-acre nursery plantation, which ought to be transplanted onto the 2,000-acre farms by January 2017.”
His reactions come after President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo during one of his visits to the region said the government is in the process of finding a strategic investor to revive the “debt-ridden and idle” Komenda Sugar Factory.
On Monday, October 18, 2021, during an interview on Eagle FM, at the commencement of his 2-day working visit to the Central Region, Nana Addo said the decision taken by his predecessor, John 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 going to start from the roof, when you haven’t built the foundation?” President Akufo-Addo asked.
According to him, “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.”
Vanni-Amoah reacting to the President’s comments said “The NPP assumed power and they abandoned the project. The sugarcane nursery plantation was left to overgrow due to lack of political will to operationalise the factory.”
In a statement, he said “In July 2018, Mr. Kyerematen sold the 125-acre sugarcanes to Akpeteshie distillers. Meanwhile, President Akufo-Addo says we did not plan on the raw materials. Akufo-Addo should ask his minister why Seftech India Private Ltd is demanding judgment debt for the job executed at the farms?
“If the president is willing to operationalise the factory, he and his ministry would not be giving flimsy excuses anytime they are asked about the Komenda Sugar factory.”
He stated former President John Mahama inaugurated the revamped Komenda Sugar Factory in a move by the government to restructure the economy and create jobs.
He said he [Mahama] “had the sugar factory as one of the priority projects.”
“Annually, over US$400,000,000 worth of sugar is imported into the country and this quantity is about 80% of the total need of the nation. The economy cannot afford this huge drain on its scarce foreign exchange reserve. There is an unbelievably huge market for sugar begging to be exploited. There is, therefore, the need that sugar-producing factories are established in this country,” he added.
