The Minister of Trade and Industry, Dr. Ekow Spio-Gabrah has stated that the Komenda Sugar Factory will be managed by Ghanaians after renovation works are completed.
[contextly_sidebar id=”iSpUMnMdyIeYELWwzEMkoZsUHpQxdKK8″]He said the Ghanaian management team will manage the factory “until and unless government decides to have a joint venture with a foreign partner if they will invest actual equity; private equity money into the project.”
Government secured a $35 million loan facility from India to revamp the collapsed factory.
Part of the money will also be used to establish an irrigation scheme for high-yielding sugar cane plantation to feed the factory.
The sugar factory which was established under Ghana’s first President, Dr Kwame Nkrumah became defunct in the 1980s due to inadequate funding and bad policies.
The rehabilitation of the factory is fulfilment of a campaign promise President John Mahama made during the 2012 general election campaign to the people of Ghana.
Speaking to Citi News, the Minister was optimistic about the prospects of the upcoming buy acyclovir project but warned government was only going to hire quality personnel to manage this new factory.
“You can’t just put people there because they want a job. You must put people there who understand the particular industry and are willing to be trained to keep up to date with the latest technologies,” he remarked.
He stressed that government has learnt great lessons from the Ayensu Starch Company at Bawjiase in the Central Region and other similar projects which includes the fact that “the technology must be right.”
“For example, we understand that the Bawjiase factory, there is a potato machinery was what was procured for a cassava processing plant so that already was a technical error at the time the place was put in place by a previous government,” he disclosed.
Another lesson he said was that the management of the projects “must be transparent and must be robust.”
By: Efua Idan Osam/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @osamidan