A criminal waste of public funds
This past week sections of the media have reported two separate cases of seeming official disquiet over failure on the part of private contractors to satisfactorily deliver on major tenders in the construction sector awarded them by the Government of Guyana.
Interestingly, both of these tenders involved hospitals, both had to do with contractors over-running the time frame for completion stipulated in the respective contracts and one (perhaps both) had to do with complete failure to carry out works stipulated under the contract. Both, naturally, had implications for additional spending totaling millions of dollars to put things right.
These are by no means uncommon occurrences. Just a few weeks earlier we learnt that a named contractor had been seriously delinquent in the timely completion of two state contracts and in one of the two cases, the subject minister, Labour Minister Manzoor Nadir was venting his spleen over the issue.
In the absence of the kind of information which is difficult to secure from public officials, one is hard-pressed to determine conclusively what accounts for this state of affairs though there is no shortage of claims by people who understand the tendering culture for state contracts in the construction sector that the problems are, in many cases, corruption-linked.
The question has been raised, for example as to why a contractor who already has a track record for shoddy work and late delivery is allowed to secure tenders for further jobs or why a contractor is awarded so many state tenders that the likelihood of him completing any of the jobs within the stipulated time frame is well nigh impossible.
These things, it has been suggested, are rooted in what is believed to be a web of corruption and kickbacks that inform the tender and bidding processes and which, we are told, may even include the blacklisting of contractors who are not prepared to be part of the charade. Then there is the forging of Certificates of Compliance from the National Insurance Scheme and the Guyana Revenue Authority and the acquisition, somehow, by contractors of Certificates of Compliance in cases where they are far from compliant under the law.
We believe that whenever a contractor deliberately underbids for a project in order to improve his chances of winning it, the amount of the additional funding that eventually has to be allocated to that project is usually greater than what it would have cost in the first place. We believe too that as is the case with the Mackenzie Hospital Complex – the project to which Dr Luncheon alluded recently – when some of the pertinent details stipulated in contracts are simply excluded by the contractors, the cost of putting those things right may also well exceed what it would have been had those things been done to specifications in the first place. And while, as Dr Luncheon put it, we have little choice but to incur the additional spending other than to endure half a project, one wonders whether a case has not long been made for a comprehensive public enquiry into the culture and practices that inform the entire system of tendering, allocating contracts, supervising works, insisting on deadlines, evaluating work done and enforcing penalties stipulated in contracts. After all it is nothing short of criminal to have public funds frittered away in that manner.
