Taking the Government for granted

Oct 12, 2008 Features / Columnists

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People often take the Government for granted, and this is largely the reason for Governments being bad at business. People gain employment in a Government agency, and being guaranteed of a salary, they do the barest minimum.

Only in Government agencies do people find that jobs that could be completed within a certain period often take longer. Contracts awarded for the execution of Government projects are often delayed, enjoy cost overruns, or are shabbily executed, with the result that the Government often must award other contracts for the execution of the same contract on which it had already spent large sums of money.

There have been numerous examples of these, and in each case the Government exercised tolerance, often accepting that there is a shortage of skills in the country. The contractors then resort to the old saying that, if you give a person an inch, they would take a mile.

Those days are over. The Government has decided that people either undertake and execute projects in keeping with the contracts, or lose the contract and pay hefty fines. This has been rigidly applied by Guyana Water Inc., which has been awarding most of the contracts in recent times.

One contractor set out to work on some pipelines, having been awarded a lucrative contract. He set about recruiting the kind of labour that would have demanded less money than certain other skilled people, who should have been employed in the first instance. In the long run, the contract had to be revoked with the work less than eighty per cent completed.

Under other circumstances, this contractor would have been allowed cost overruns and lengthy extensions at great cost to the taxpayers.

This time, under the new dispensation, not only has the contract been revoked, the contractor has been banned from ever undertaking future works with Guyana Water Inc.

Other projects have attracted similar Government attention, and one of the most high profile has been the Skeldon Modernisation Programme being undertaken by the Chinese.

This project should have been completed a long time ago, but for a series of reasons, some of them unacceptable, the project has been experiencing delays, which have not done this country any good, and the Government decided to act.

The announcement of a hefty fine seems to have done wonders, because all of a sudden the project is back on track, and some of the so-called faults that emerged and have been blamed for the delays have been corrected.

The critics would argue that the approach adopted by the Government should have been standard operational procedure, but the very critics were among the foremost to accuse the Government of being too harsh. Contractors working on schools complained when the axe fell on them.

Just this past week, one contractor was so sloppy that he left nail-infested boards in the schoolyard and caused a child to be stuck. Obviously, the parents would blame the Government instead of the contractor. This contractor would be penalized.

The Government is also looking at the construction of the Berbice River Bridge, which is behind schedule. Again, there have been spurious reasons for the delay, and these would not be accepted by the Government.

The approaches should have been completed eons ago, but for some reason, one approach is nothing more than a track more than two years after the project started.

The contractor believes that there is no need to complete the approach until the bridge is finished, but that can never be the case because, within another few months, after numerous extensions, the bridge should be completed. But from the scheme of things, this could see further delays.

The Government and the contractors are aware that there is a fixed cost attached to the bridge, that no matter how long the construction process takes, the cost would remain.

However, delays could prove costly to the Government because of the opportunity costs, and being a major communication link between the eastern part of the country and the rest, there is a lot to be lost.

In these times when money is becoming increasingly scarce, the Government will do everything to ensure that the taxpayers get their due, and no one should blame the Government. Indolence and crookery will not be tolerated.

However, the Government is not sitting idly by hoping that the skills situation would correct itself. It is training young people at great cost, and those trained would need adequate supervision to become the leaders of tomorrow.

There will be more projects, and the Government is bent on ensuring that there is no more shoddy work or dishonest behaviour.

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