The government is finalising a 20-year lease arrangement with a new investor to inject funds into Komenda Sugar Development Company Limited to restore and maintain its operations.
Mr Kobina Tahir Hammond, Trade and Industry Minister, made the announcement on Wednesday after visiting the sugar mill, which has not been operating for more than seven years since its commissioning.
The new company, West Africa Agro Limited, is now importing some 550 tonnes of raw sugar and refining it into sulpherless white sugar, with the aim to produce sugarcane sugar in three years.
Speaking with the media after the visit to the company, Mr Hammond said, the government has invested about GHS45 million to put the company in shape, leading to the investor expressing interest to run the sugar factory.
“We’re leasing our assets to the company, which is going to work on it and pay us at the end of the day… I am thinking of leasing it to them for 15 to 20 years with an option of extension.
“Initially, they’re bringing crude sugar to refine, and from the documentation, we should be expecting some refined sugar [from sugarcane production] … it will take about three years,” he said.
Mr Hammond said the contract would ensure that after the three-year period, enough sugarcane would have been cultivated on some available 31,000 hectares of land at various places, including 6,000 hectares on the project site.
This would result in the full-scale operation of the factory, ending raw sugar refining to make room for sugarcane to be processed into sulpherless white sugar at the plant.
“Ultimately, we’ll see some life in the plant… government keeps expending money into making sure that it doesn’t become a white elephant,” Mr Hammond said, adding that a Board had been established to ensure the success of the company.
According to a 2017 Parliament report on the facility’s condition, which was analysed by the Ghana News Agency, the 1,250TDC plant cost a total of US$37.82 million, and could only perform a test run, producing sugar that was inedible.
It reported that the test run was unable to complete the entire process of producing sulpherless white sugar due to several operational issues, including a failure to meet melt clarity standards.
At the time, there were no vertical crystallisers, dosing system, molasses weighing system, bagasse compressor, weighing bridge, grip crane, and an effluent treatment plant had also not been constructed.
In all, some 31 items were either not installed or had been completed but required additional work to enable the plant to operate at full capacity, the report indicated.
Among other things, it was recommended that the facility run on imported raw sugar for 12 months, as was already done by the new company, before producing white sugar from the sugarcane nucleus farm.
It was also recommended that test runs be carried out extensively, from crane crushing to sulpherless white sugar production, to meet the International Commission for the Uniform Methods of Sugar Analysis standards.
GNA