Make use or dispose of idle machinery at sugar miller

An audit finding that a Sh295 million cane crushing plant sits idle at Nzoia Sugar Company since its purchase 28 years ago has drawn attention to wastage of public resources.

This amount of money is huge and should not be lost because of bad decisions by some officials who were either inept in planning or hell-bent on stealing public funds through dubious procurement plots outright.

Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu said the miller bought the plant in 1993 as part of a production expansion programme but it has never been commissioned. The machinery was to aid expand the factory cane processing capacity from 3,000 tonnes to 7,000 tonnes a day.

Nearly three decades later the machinery is gathering dust somewhere in the factory premises in western Kenya and runs the risk of being rendered obsolete because of evolving technology.

This is very upsetting because the State Corporation is perennially insolvent partly due to the inefficiencies caused by aging and obsolete machinery. It is not right for taxpayers to keep bailing out Nzoia Sugar when a machine that would have helped solve its cash woes sits idle and risks being written off.

The management of Nzoia Sugar must unlock the potential of this investment and put the machine to use immediately to supplement the aging factory equipment. There is also the option of disposing of the machinery at a competitive price and routing the cash towards the upgrade of other factory equipment.

And even as this happens, there is an urgent need for a review of the strategy and planning capacities of State corporations.

A lot of public resources go to waste every so often because of silly decisions by some public officials who don’t seem to care about the consequences of their actions. It has become common for officials to sink huge amounts of money into projects without conducting any due diligence on their viability or practicality.

This kind of situation demands a shake-up in the approval of public projects so that only viable ventures are taken up while keeping an eye on cartels that thrive on siphoning public funds through phony schemes.