The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, says his predecessor, John Dramani Mahama, betrayed every principle of construction by building the Komenda Sugar factory without first establishing a sugarcane plantation.
"Imagine you're building a house and you decide to begin with the roof before laying a foundation. How is the house constructed? When you haven't built the foundation, are you going to start with the roof?" President Akufo-Addo was the one who inquired.
"You would expect that every industrial endeavor would begin with, first and foremost, what you want to do, what you want to produce," President Akufo-Addo says. Once you've determined that, the next stage is to figure out what inputs, or things, you'll need to feed into your factory in order to get to your outputs, and you'll be happy when you start creating your product that those inputs are present."
But this is not John Mahama's way of doing things, he said, because "he would rather build the roof, then come down and build the foundation after the roof is built." You know that a house erected on that foundation will fall down, just like Komenda did."
In response to comments made by the former President last Friday, the President made this known during an interview on Eagle FM on Monday, October 18th, 2021, at the start of his 2-day working visit to the Central Region.
Former President Mahama said during an interview on Cape FM that "I'm not so naive to set up a plant and have no preparation for the provision of raw materials." I was aware of the vision. Despite not having put up a single sugarcane plantation to serve as a raw material source for the manufacturing, it was to get the raw materials first.
A test run was never completed before the Komenda Sugar Factory was commissioned in May 2016, according to information from an October 2017 Technical Audit Team made up of experts from academia, industry, and independent sugarcane consultants. This was due to a lack of sufficient sugarcane for the test run.
Furthermore, upon commissioning, the factory was unable to produce the required refined sulphurless white sugar due to the absence of 35 component parts/units, including melt clarification, vertical crystallizers, molasses weighing system, bagasse compressor, and a dosing system, which were not fully installed prior to the test run. At the time of commissioning, the Effluent Treatment Plant had not yet been built.
President Akufo-Addo also announced that a preliminary assessment of the factory's value found that it had been overvalued by almost $12 million.
The Forensic Audit Report was sent to EOCO, which has now written to the Attorney General's Office and the Ministry of Justice to conduct additional investigations for possible prosecution.
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