Komenda Sugar Factory Turns Grass Cutter Hunting Ground …ASAP warns of youth’s boiling anger

Ghana is on cue to start the repayment of the US$35million that it took from the Indian Exim Bank four years ago, to fund the construction of the Komenda sugar factory and yet the factory itself is yet to start operations.

In its state of abandonment, the factory building is rotting away as weeds overgrow it and provide lair for wild animals, especially, grass cutter.

Consequently, unemployed youth of the country who have plenty time on their hands have learned to improvise somehow, turning the factory into a hunting ground for grass cutter.

The state of affairs has angered a youth group, the Alliance for Survival of Abandoned Projects (ASAPA) which is calling on all of Ghana’s Ex-Presidents and traditional leaders, including the Asantehene, Otumfuor Osei Tutu ll, to intervene.

“Plead our cause because we have become pathetic,” an ASAP member who did a short video story on the abandonment of the project said. He warned inTwi, that if nothing is done to reverse the abandonment of the project, “ the youth will erupt in anger and it may be too late to stop the tumult.”

Speaking the youth’s mind, the narrator in the video story points out that President Akufo-Addo did not even mention the Komenda sugar factory in the last State of the Nation Address (SONA), indicating the factory is forgotten. This same forgotten factory, however, he points out, holds more potential for employment than any of the supposed factories that the government is building under the “One District One Factory” program.

“This factory has the capacity to employ 7,400 youth,” the narrator emphasized.

On the 24th of November last year, ASAP, had broadcasted a first video story on the sugar factory’s state of abandonment. This had prompted government to introduce a supposed strategic investor.

ASAP points out that the supposed strategic investor may have just been a deliberate red herring as the investor, has since traveling down to Komenda and speaking to the media, failed to step foot there again.

In the video story, ambivalence of supposed strategic investor is depicted when an insert of a short interview he had given the media was played. In that insert, representative of the strategic investor, Park Agrotech Company Limited, responds to a request for definite timelines on the commencement of work by saying that negotiations had not been completed. “ We are waiting for the final agreement, after that we will start work,” the investor had said.

The narrator in the video points out that it means the Park Agrotech rep had traveled all the way from India to Ghana to give the impression that he was coming to pump money into the project, when he knew there was no contract in place.

The video also has an insert of the MCE for or Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abrem (KEEA), Nana Appiah Korang, who is heard saying that he did not even know the details of the arrangement with the strategic investor.

“…as I stand here I must confess that what the arrangements are, I don’t know, what I know is my mother has got a new husband and therefore a new father for me,” the MCE had said.