In an interview with Stabroek News last Monday, President Irfaan Ali defended the controversial $566.9m contract award to Kares Engineering Inc for the rebuilding of the North Ruimveldt Secondary School and evinced exasperation at the concerns that had been raised about the process.
The President said that all awards for government contracts follow the law which also has room for adjudication and that there was only so much government can do.
“This was a public tender. What are we to do? If you went out, if you go to public tender, a public process, people participate in the process, there’s a recommendation that goes to the tender board, the Board sends a recommendation to Cabinet, who can only have a response…what else is there to do?” the President questioned during the interview with this newspaper.
The President was also asked about concerns of perceived procurement corruption with large public projects.
“First of all, I do not control the tender process. Every single project went out to public tender. In that public tender, the bids were received, there is an evaluation by the tender board and the recommendation sent to Cabinet. All we do is offer a no-objection,” he stressed. The President added that the governing party has “no affiliation” with the company awarded the contract. “I don’t know the party having any affiliation with any person; Kares or anyone else that is the justification for someone getting a project.”
The people of this country did not fight tooth and nail over five months to uphold free and fair elections only for the government to show a lack of awareness of its fiduciary responsibilities and the need to rigorously police public spending. Winning elections is really just a sliver of the monumental responsibilities that governments face and it is important that President Ali, his ministers, ministries and agencies understand this.
The President is correct that there was a public tender process for the North Ruimveldt school. Where he lost the plot was the lack of recognition that at any number of points along this process the onus of ensuring rectitude and probity falls on public servants and political appointees. Where they fail to faithfully discharge their obligations to the people, the process becomes corrupted and the taxpayers lose big time; not the President or his ministers but the taxpayers and the people of this country. Furthermore, where they fail, safeguards exist and must be triggered to protect public finances.
Former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran continues to provide unstinting service to his country by virtue of his accountability column in this newspaper and via other interventions. He would have been a perfect candidate for the procurement oversight architecture from its inception but has now been overlooked by two different administrations. In a recent column, he magisterially laid out the administrative failings along the pro-cess that led to the flawed decision to choose Kares Engineering Inc as the contractor for the rebuilding of the burnt out North Ruimveldt Multilateral.
Completely overlooked throughout the entire process was the reprehensible performance of Kares on the construction of the Kato Secondary School in 2012. Surely, the President himself having been part of the 2011 to 2015 Ramotar administration must have had some recollection of that disastrous performance. How then was that not factored into the consideration of bids for the construction of this school given the awareness of the premium that should be placed on top performance?
The first failing as Mr Goolsarran pointed out was at the level of the Ministry of Education, the procuring agency. The bid document that the ministry drew up should have required evidence of previous performance on school projects whether good or bad. It was apparently not required as if it was, the next tier in the procurement process, the Evaluation Committee of the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) would hopefully not have dared to disregard this. The bid document issued by the ministry should be released to the public and the Permanent Secretary should answer questions as to why the contractor’s track record was not a matter to be significantly factored into the selection process.
One also wonders how the Evaluation Committee of the NPTAB was so completely unaware of Kares’ poor performance on a relatively recent school project but was in a position to say that one of the companies that bid lower than Kares had not declared an abandoned project.
Once the Evaluation Committee had completed its work, the Ministry of Education still had reserve powers to reject the conclusion and indicate which one of the bidders should be the preferred bidder. It failed again to act.
Cabinet completed the trifecta of dereliction by providing its no-objection to the contract despite the fact that the Minister of Education would have been well aware of the horrendous failings on the Kato project.
The toothy smiles at the obligatory ribbon-tied spade-set, sod-turning was another blow to those who consider judicious spending to be a key benchmark by which the quality of governance is examined.
There is an alarming nonchalance that attends this government’s attitude towards the requirement for good contracting considering that shoddy work can cost the country huge sums.
Another shocking manifestation of this came from Vice President Jagdeo. Speaking on Friday in Berbice at the signing of $8.6b – yes $8.6b – worth of road contracts, Mr Jagdeo suggested that the shortage of contractors could result in recourse to one that had done inferior work.
Noting an apparent shortage of contractors which is more than likely the poor absorptive capacity that experts and international agencies have been repeatedly warning the government about, Mr Jagdeo said: “So even when sometimes we get shoddy work, people say why you giving him another project but that contractor might be the only one bidding”. Shocking. As in the case of Kares, even if the company was the only bidder the contract should not have been awarded to it. No contract must knowingly be given to a contractor who has shown the incapacity to deliver on a project and President Ali and his ministers should put this front and centre of their deliberations.
With the ministry, the NPTAB and Cabinet all abdicating their responsibilities in this matter it is left to be seen if the recently appointed Public Procurement Commission (PPC) will act to examine the basis of the award to Kares. It has the full authority to do this.
The contract for the North Ruimveldt school should be put on hold until there is a forensic examination of the process by the relevant authorities.
