- "We have put so much power in the hands of the executive that sometimes they just get up, go and set up anything for political expediency for people to clap for them."
Dr Adu Owusu Sarkodie, a senior lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Ghana, says Ghana must be careful in judging how it wants to revitalise its industrialisation drive.
Dr Owusu Sarkodie was responding to the raging debate over the Komenda sugar factory in the Central Region.
Speaking with Nana Yaa Mensah on The Asaase Breakfast Show on Tuesday (19 October), he said, “We don’t have to force ourselves to necessarily continue with the Komenda sugar factory.
“We could have put [a factory] up elsewhere if we felt it will still minimise costs and give us the best optimisation that we are looking for, and then maybe set up a shoe factory in Komenda if that could also give us the optimisation that we are looking for …”
At the mercy of the executive
He added, “We must be careful as a country that wants to revitalise its industrialisation drive. We have failed on a number of occasions as a country and we don’t seem to have learned our lessons. We are still continuing the whole political economy … running this country.
“I have a big problem with the fact that we are not able to dichotomise economic efficiency and political expediency. We have put so much power in the hands of the executive that sometimes they just get up, go and set up anything for political expediency for people to clap for them, for them to win votes, and after winning the elections forget about efficiency …
“I want to see the report of the technocrats [on the Komenda sugar factory] and what went into the planning, what went into all the cost-benefit analysis of such factory. We don’t have to do this to ourselves as a country. We need to move beyond this,” Owusu Sarkodie said.
“That dichotomy – how to decouple economic expediency from political expediency – has been the bane of our industrialisation drive.”
Lack of raw materials
President Akufo-Addo has lashed out at his immediate predecessor, John Dramani Mahama, for building the Komenda sugar factory without factoring in a source of raw materials.
The president said the decision by Mahama to build the Komenda factory without first establishing a sugarcane plantation betrays every principle of construction.
“It is like building a house, and saying you are going to start from the roof before you have a foundation. How does the house get built? You’re going to start from the roof, when you haven’t built the foundation?” President Akufo-Addo asked.
According to the president, “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, he said, is not Mahama’s way of doing things, because: “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.”
“I knew what the vision was”
President Akufo-Addo made these comments on Monday (18 October) during an interview on Eagle FM at the start of his two-day working visit to the Central Region. The comments came in response to remarks by the former president on Friday (15 October 2021).
It will be recalled that in an interview on Cape FM, Mahama 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.” However, his government did not set up a sugarcane plantation to provide raw materials for the factory.
Information from an October 2017 technical audit team, made up of experts from academia and industry, as well as independent sugarcane consultants, showed that a test run was never completed before the Komenda factory was commissioned in May 2016, because there was not sufficient sugarcane available for the exercise.
Moreover, on commissioning, the factory was not in a position to produce the required refined, sulphurless, white sugar because 35 component parts/units were not fully installed before the planned test run. These included equipment needed for melt clarification, vertical crystallisers, a molasses weighing system, a bagasse compressor and a dosing system.
An effluent treatment plant had also not been built at the time of the commissioning.
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