President announces terms and conditions review of existing civil works contract

Great words Mr. President, now deliver, please

Sep 29, 2020 Editorial

The caption should captivate every angry, disgusted Guyanese: “President announces terms and conditions review of existing civil works contracts -contractors, supervisors, project units to be held accountable for poor performance, substandard works” (KN September 26). Now the president must step up and make good, through what could be a new day for Guyanese wishing for more from their tax money spent on numerous public projects.
Undoubtedly, his words are stirring, and the objectives embraceable, since they are so relevant and mean so much to regular citizens, who are held to ransom, time and again, when these projects fail. The list is long and tiring, but we name a few: roads breaking down; sea defences collapsing; schools built shabbily; inferior materials; repeated delays; and expensive cost overruns. Winning contractors, by and large, have not performed well or delivered work of a consistently high quality. It does not matter if they are local or foreign; it is the same depressing story.
Supervising engineers sign off on the ramshackle and inexplicable. Project unit personnel effectively sleep on the job or are conspicuously missing in action, but they certify what falls apart more often than not. All the players, to a large degree, have put heads together to operate in cahoots to cheat the system and the Guyanese taxpayers footing the bill and carrying the debt load. It has been a long and mutually rewarding relationship with everybody having a grand time, and only taxpaying citizens getting shafted and always coming up short.
After all, they have to navigate the roads, send their children to possibly dangerous schools, or live in low-lying areas for which a lot of money was spent to make new and deliver a modern and better quality of service and life. Because of all of this, the words and postures of President Ali have to give hope, even if there is only partial improvement through limited delivery. The scope and scale of what the president has said are far reaching and have some reality checks that must be put on the table for consideration. Those reality checks are drawn from the wells of real life and could prove to be material obstacles that inhibit the noble words and intentions of the president.
One example that immediately comes to mind goes like this. Big contractors win awards from procurement boards for big public projects involving hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of Guyana dollars. These same contractors are part of the savvy and versatile Guyanese engineering and construction scenes. They know how things work, who play along, and how to make the underlying project papers present what they wish to share. Many things can be obscured, or made to look aboveboard, when they are far from such.
Further, and more to the point, many, if not all, of the major contractors, have a good appreciation for how things operate in Guyana at the political and bureaucratic levels. They are significant donors to political coffers and were generous with their funds in the just concluded elections. These contractors are powers in their own right and have earned the right to access to the halls of power all the way to the top. They can influence things and outcomes; they can make stubborn and uncooperative people move in the bureaucratic realm, and should that fail, then their political reach enables them to get matters corrected and overlooked to their liking with no penalties imposed and the usual project merry go round continuing.
It is on this that we trust that the president’s public words and postures will have real meaning, through inflexible application at the individual level, when matters done wrong are escalated for political intervention. That will negate all that President Ali shared.
It is that we must get value for the money spent. Documents must be retained, readily available, and handed over upon the asking, as well as posted publicly for scrutiny. Participants must be held accountable through processes that are transparent. These projects are neither cheap nor free for taxpaying Guyanese, they accumulate annually. Guyanese pay heavily and are due higher standards. Those who do not deliver must perform or pay steep prices. The president must be true to his words.