The epic of the Bamia Primary School contract rumbles on. The contract was awarded in November 2021 and was intended to run for twenty months, but its completion date has been postponed more times than anyone cares to remember. The school was supposed to have been finished in July 2023, but then this was amended to November 2023, following which that deadline too was abandoned and substituted with a new one of April 1st 2024.
This last date had been announced by Minister of Local Government Sonia Parag during the Budget debate, who also told the House that an additional $127 million had been allocated for the completion of the school. And now the extra funding notwithstanding, the first day of April has come and gone, and the children of the area are still waiting to walk through the new school’s doors. The building is said to be around 78% complete.
It is another sorry tale of awarding contracts to unsuitable bidders who happen to have connections with the government. One does not require any kind of engineering qualification to know that bidders whose background is in entertainment and football should not be the ones to undertake the construction of a public project, even if their bid is the second lowest, as in this case.
But this consideration apparently did not cause the members of the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board evaluation committee any pause for thought. They just steamed ahead and awarded the contract for the $346 million building to St8ment Investment Inc, whose principals are Rawle Ferguson and Kerwin Bollers of Hits and Jams Entertainment as well as Aubrey ‘Shanghai’ Major and Kashif Muhammed of the Kashif and Shanghai football tournament. The entity had been formed just a few months before bidding for the project and had no proven construction background. Why genuine construction companies who put in bids were bypassed in this instance has never been explained. But then, of course, the decision would be very difficult if not impossible to explain on any rational grounds.
When this newspaper at the end of last year spoke to one of the company’s representatives about the delays in the building programme, he had replied that the problem lay in sourcing what was needed and also time. “We had some challenges with materials and stuff like that; as you know it’s all the way in Linden, so … having to be supplied with materials from so many places in Linden and some of the resources we had to source as far as Parika … ” he was quoted as saying.
Region Ten Chairman Deron Adams, clearly had little patience for this saying that other contractors in the regions were not complaining of these issues. “How [is it] no other contractors, the Brazilians, who are doing the bigger project are not complaining about road building materials, whether it’s stone, sand, whatever it is …? How is everyone else completing their project? This is the only project that has a problem with logistics and finding building materials.”
While construction of the school is a Local Government Ministry project, oversight of it comes under the Region 10 Council, and Mr Adams told this newspaper at the end of last year that the failure to complete the project in a timely fashion had implications for the development of the region as it related to several other projects. He cited, for example, the fact that their hands were tied with the Inter-American Development Bank, since they had applied for funding for the Wisroc School which was very overcrowded, but given the incomplete Bamia project it did not make the regional administration look good. He went on to say that the only reason they have been giving the contractors a measure of leeway was because of the project’s importance, which was not about politics. However, if it was up to the region, he said, the contract would have been terminated.
He explained that over the sum of $100 million odd, they would have had to return money to the Ministry of Finance, so they wrote the ministry asking if the money could be diverted to several inclusion projects, particularly schools in the region, in order to ensure that the funds allocated for Bamia were spent. The latter project would then roll over to the new year (2024). While this request was approv-ed, it meant that other projects would have to be stalled, and it would effectively deny the region the opportunity to focus on new projects. “They will then put back another hundred and something millions of our 2024 budget for that same project to the disadvantage of the region, because that money would have been allocated for another project, maybe the construction of another school,” he said.
In short, even without the extra funds allocated to the Bamia project, delays of this order cost money. It is not as if the government is doing anything meaningful to address the problem. Instead, President Irfaan Ali has asked the Attorney General to issue an edict to ministries to establish units to evaluate the execution of all contracts and assess the performance of the contractors.
This seems to tackle the problem at the wrong end, and in the case of Bamia the damage has already been done, and all the opportunities along the way for intervention have been missed. As we pointed out in a Monday editorial two weeks ago, one of the main reasons for poor work on contracts is the lack of an Engineers’ Act to make sure that those who bid for construction projects are “fit for purpose.” In the case of the Bamia Primary School they were clearly not. While a draft Engineers’ Bill has been hovering around in the parliamentary atmosphere for 44 months, the government has made no moves to translate it into law. As the leader said, “Its reason for doing this is to enrich portions of its constituency so that they can in turn be of use to the ruling party no matter the risk to the public purse from dodgy work.”
We also pointed out that project evaluation units would add an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, and would involve additional expense for taxpayers. Why should they be necessary, we asked, if each project has a supervisory consultant, or is it that there is a shortage of engineers? As it is they would now have to be “shadowed” by a project evaluation unit, we wrote. And then of course there is the unforgiveable behaviour of the evaluation committees, in addition to the dereliction if the Public Procurement Commission. What is happening now is that projects like Bamia and Tepui are revealing just how flawed and inefficient the system is, and how it has facilitated avenues for cronyism and corruption.
If the President and his government are disinclined to confront the issues head on, a measure of accountability in the case of Bamia has come from a different direction. In January of this year Public Accounts Committee Chairman Jermaine Figueira and MP Juretha Fernandes requested that the Auditor General treat the matter of the construction of the school as a matter of public importance, since it had not been included in his report. Mr Figueira said the PAC cannot direct the Auditor General to insert an item in his report, but the opposition members on that committee, “will request that the AG does a performance audit on the project, because it is indeed a subject for scrutiny.”
A few days later Mr Deodat Sharma responded that the Bamia School project had not been documented in his 2022 report, because it was not yet complete. However, once completed it would be an item in his 2023 report. However, earlier this month we reported that the Auditor General had undertaken an examination into the construction of the Bamia School after receipt of a letter from the CEO of the Public Procurement Commission requesting “examination of the tender award and any necessary actions emanating therefrom.”
While the AG’s report will come out some time this year, it has to be acknowledged that it is by no means clear when the PAC will consider it and submit its own report to Parliament. At the moment it has a five-year backlog, and if the extraordinary justifications for that body’s delays supplied by Minister Teixeira in our edition yesterday are anything to go by, it won’t be scrutinising the AG’s report in a hurry. Hopefully, the very act of investigating will serve as a stimulus to completion of the Bamia project, although it won’t solve the larger problems associated with the awarding of contracts.
In the meantime we understand that the Regional Executive Officer had written asking for an extension of the deadline. What the new date will be has not yet been announced.
