[ 2016-08-26 ]

Soldiers stop Ghana Gas workers' demonstration
Men of the Ghana Armed Forces have stopped a
demonstration by over 100 Ghanaian workers of the
Ghana Gas Company Limited plant at Atuabo in the
Western region.

Joy News' Kwaku Owusu Peprah said the workers, who
were staging a demonstration Friday morning to
register their anger and force the management of
Ghana Gas to fix the fire safety issues at the
plant were forced to abandon their demonstration.

According to the workers, the least spark of fire
at the processing plant could spell disaster for
Ghana as the fire safety system at the strategic
installation have been seriously compromised.

The Military were called in by management to stop
the demonstrators from entering the plant.

Engineers at the Plant tell Joy News' Kwaku Owusu
Peprah that the fire extinguishers at the billion
dollar facility have expired for the past eight
months.

Besides, the mobile fire extinguishers, the highly
sophisticated deluge valve system which is
supposed to serve as the first response to fire
has failed to trigger at several safety drills.

The safety officers at the plant have therefore
declared the system as being out of order and
cannot caution workers who operate within the
plant in case of a fire incident.

"You won't believe but this is a plant that has
fire extinguishers that have expired for more than
eight months and when engineers took a drastic
action by bringing them out they were given
queries and stuff. This is how the $1 billion
plant is being managed," he said.

"We have a very high level of inefficiency in the
management system of Ghana Gas," he added.

One of the workers who spoke to Joy News said with
gas plants considered one of the most explosive
plants in the world, the situation cannot be
permitted to persist.

The workers further claim that the skills transfer
programme in the contracted which demands that the
Sinopec engineers train the Ghanaian counterparts
to take over the engineering and mechanical
management of the plant have not been followed.

According to the workers, they suffer bad working
conditions with one worker saying “the
management is very bad and we also have a system
that does not recognize hard work and reward
it.”

He said management does not care about their
welfare despite all the efforts they have put in
building the plant.

“We have people who have been working with the
Chinese for close to two years and the agreement
was that they [Chinese] are to train us so that we
take over by the second year but that has been
ineffective,” the worker told Joy News.

The workers are calling for Ghanaians to be
employed to manage the affairs of the Plant
insisting “we are capable of taking over from
them and managing the plant as well as having a
specialized training for fellow Ghanaians."

Although the workers have been forced to cut short
their demonstration, they hope to reignite it next
week but are asking government to change the
management.

PRO of Ghana Gas, Alfred Ogbame, has however
dismissed the concerns of the workers.

He discounted reports that the demonstration was
stopped by the military, insisting that the
demonstrators failed to get the required turnout
for their demonstration.

“The demo was against an undertaking that they
[workers] had at a meeting organised by the
Ministry of Petroleum attended by the local union
as well as their mother [national] union," he
said.

According to him, the mother union felt so
embarrassed by some of the issues the local union
members raised at the meeting emphasising that the
mother union has dissociated itself from the
attempted demonstration.

He condemned the action of the workers sending out
pictures of expired fire extinguishers, which have
been tagged for replacement in “a planned
maintenance shutdown that would be occurring from
August 31 to September 7.”

Mr Ogbame, however, said the plants have the fire
extinguisher that has not expired although not all
the extinguishers have been replaced.

He added that is not the extinguishers are not the
only things used to fight a fire and there are
other facilities at the plant while chastising the
workers for misinforming the media.

Regarding the agreement for Sinopec to hand over
to Ghanaians after two years, he said government
is also worried about it and is working on the
transfer of knowledge.

"This is because the rate at which we were
expecting the transfer of knowledge to occur has
not been the same based on issues like
language...the timeline for the process has not
been exhausted," Mr Ogbame said.

Source - Myjoyonline.com

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