• The debate over the functionality of the Komenda Sugar factory still rages on
• The latest to comment is President Akufo-Addo
• He has described John Mahama as building a roof without a foundation
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has taken a swipe at his predecessor, John Dramani Mahama over the Komenda Sugar factory.
The sugar-producing factory which was first established in 1964 has now become defunct as a result of technical difficulties and setbacks. The birth of the factory was based on the premise of producing sugar locally in a bid to reduce importation but that is yet to yield any results in recent times.
According to President Akufo-Addo, the erstwhile John Mahama government’s decision 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 quizzed.
“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 the president pointed 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.”
President Akufo-Addo made the comments during an interview on Eagle FM in the central region as part of a working visit to the area.
Before President Akufo-Addo’s comments, John Mahama during an interview in the same region on Friday, October 15, said, “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.”
Though the erstwhile John Mahama administration recommissioned the factory on May 30, 2016, in a bid to get it functioning once again and offer employment for the youth, the move hit a snag as the Akufo-Addo-led government took office shortly after in 2017.
The recommissioned Komenda Sugar Factory was expected to create some 7,300 direct and indirect jobs at full operational capacity. The factory is said to be able to crush 1,250 tonnes of sugar cane daily.
