The collapse of Juapong Textiles Company
The Juapong Textiles Company was established in 1968 to produce and supply grey baft to other textile industries in the country.
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In 2004, the former majority shareholder, Vlisco BV of the Netherlands withdrew its interest in the joint venture to enable it to concentrate on its core textile printing business in the Ghana Textiles Printing (GTP).
The state acquired the Vlisco share and established Volta Star Textiles Limited (VSTL) as a limited liability company in 2007.
The company has been a strategic investment opportunity for the state because it offers employment to the formal and informal sector.
It has recruited a large army of employees over the years and continues to serve as a source of livelihood to residents of Juapong and the Tongu area, becoming the pride of the people of Tongu.
The company is the largest state investment in the industrial sector in the Volta Region and undoubtedly has remained a world-class producer of grey baft for GTP.
It processes lint cotton into spun yarn and subsequently into grey baft in its spinning and weaving mills respectively.
It has the biggest spinning and weaving capacity in the country, with an estimated 26 million yards a year. Its current cloth production is 936 tappet looms with an average loom speed of 164 reams per minute.
The ring spinning capacity is 35,000 spindles, with a spindle speed of 11,000 reams per minute turning out 3,700,000 kilogrammes of spun yarn a year.
Raw materials and market
The company has a reliable raw material base of lint cotton from Northern Ghana and imported supplements from neighbouring West African countries, with a ready market for finished products. But in recent times, workers of the company have gone haywire over the non-payment of their salary arrears for nine months, which has made them block the gates to the company and also lock out management.
The workers ignored all negotiations proposed by the board, management and the Ministry of Trade and Industry and insisted that the factory could not reopen until President John Mahama visited the facility to see things for himself.
The factory owes its 1,200 workforce more than GHø3.6million for more than nine months, but a bailout of GHø6million has been announced by the Export Development and Investment Fund (EDAIF). This is expected to be used in settling the company’s huge indebtedness to the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) and the payment of salary arrears to workers.
The baffling thing in VSTL’s present state of the affairs is its inability to keep faith with its workers.
With its state-of-the-art technology in the textile industry, it is unjustifiable for such a company with huge investments in the lives of the people to be found wanting, because Juapong is known as ‘the pillow city’ in Ghana. In fact, majority of the women at Juapong and the surrounding villages derive their livelihood from the sale of pillows and today, Juapong has earned the accolade “pillow city of Ghana” because seamstresses in the community always transform the residue of the Volta Star Company into pillows, selling them along the streets.