Governance Lecturer at the Central University, Dr. Benjamin Otchere-Ankrah has wondered why the Komenda Sugar Factory has not been functional since President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo took over government in 2017.
In May 2016, then-President John Mahama inaugurated the revamped Komenda Sugar Factory in a move by the government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to restructure the economy and create jobs.
However, it was closed in June 2016 barely a month after its inauguration for lack of raw materials to feed it.
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.”
But Dr. Benjamin Otchere-Ankrah has slammed the President over the defunct Komenda Sugar Factory.
Speaking on Accra-based Peace FM, he said “For this current government not to be able to make the factory functional, for me, it’s a failure on their part. They could have done it but have allowed it to go waste.”
“The factory will help us to stop the importation of sugar and also create more jobs,” he added.
