Who says we have engineers at TOR? -Wayo

Straight-talking Charles Kofi Wayo has poured scorn on engineers working at the gutted Tema Oil Refinery, asking if they qualify to even be called engineers when they cannot manufacture common bolts and have to wait for three months for foreign expertise to fix the minutest of problems.

The refinery on Tuesday caught fire leading to the death of two persons and the destruction of nine tankers and installed equipment.

Speaking on Adom FM’s Dwaso Nsem morning show programme, Kofi Wayo, a member of the board of the Energy Commission, described the entire refinery, as a waiting hazard and a dangerous place to be, given the sort of activities that go on there on a daily basis.

“You know, TOR, the whole Refinery is a fire hazard if you know what refinery is all about, ok. I have been in the business for almost 30 years so I know, just by sight, you understand, the maintenance is poor.”

Chanting a long list of safety procedures he said must be observed at the refinery but which for him are non-existent, he said God is our only protector from fire disasters at TOR and not because of anyone’s so-called expertise. Kofi Wayo has since December 2008, predicted that TOR was likely to catch fire given conditions and activities there.

Asked what he thought was required to get all the required systems working at the refinery, Wayo replied “You’ve got to know what you’re doing. When you know what you’re doing, you’ll know what you got to do, when you know what you got to do, you put the damn thing on the ground, like we say.”

“Are you suggesting we don’t have expertise at the refinery?” asked Ekuorba Gyasi, host of the programme.

“Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows it, it’s a place for you to go and make money, that’s it…If the refinery was in Europe or United States they would shut it down. We say they would get it, they will not allow it to function.”

“But we have qualified engineers who are working on it and for some time we haven’t had the fire outbreak there and the understanding I have is that they are maintaining a high standard of safety so why do you conclude that way?”

“If you have engineers there why is it that one small bolt you have to wait for a white man two, three months. You can’t even make your own bolts…You can’t even tool anything down there, even gasket - common gasket when it blows, you shut down the RFCC and stuff like that so where are the engineers? Where are the engineers?”

“Right now, you have to know that God is protecting us so far. God is the only one protecting us because anyone who sees that refinery knows that hey, this is not a place to be, this is not a place to be.”

He threatened to resign his membership of the Energy Commission if his advice is continually spurned, suggesting that he had counseled several times on some measures that need to be in place but have all landed on deaf ears.