$11m Fish Plant Rots Away

·  Now processes ‘ice cubes’

Two years after commissioning a Turnkey Fish Processing Plant built by Expotec International Limited of India with funding from the EXIM Bank of India, the facility has been left to rot away in Elmina.

The facility, commissioned in November 2016 by John Dramani Mahama when he was President, was to provide facilities for descaling, gutting, filleting and packaging of fish and a blast freezer.

Other facilities at the plant are a cold storage facility with a capacity of 100 metric tons, an ice block plant, a waste processing component for producing fish and animal feed, clinic, canteen and a crèche.

The project cost the state government about $11million United State Dollar to construct and equip.

The processing plant was envisaged to improve their income levels by reducing post-harvest losses.

But the hope of these fisherfolks is fast eroding as government fails to get the factory to work two years after its completion.

Fisher folks in the Central Region, specifically, Elmina have expressed shock and angst over   the neglect of the ultramodern fish processing plant following The Hawks’ investigative series on how poor government planning, and outright neglect has ruined the ultramodern fish processing plant.

The 100 metric tons capacity plant, and a waste processing component for producing animal feed has been reduced to an iced block factory.

The plant was handed to a private Ghanaian company, Raphel Spectrum Company Limited, to manage on behalf of the state but it is yet to be ope-rationalized for its intended purpose.

There is similar project positioned in Komanteng and Manford both fishing communities in the Central Region.

What is constant is the missing hundreds of jobs and opportunities that would have accompanied the operation of the plant to ease the spate of unemployment in that part of the country.