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.