The fire and the halt to any investigation

Jul 18, 2009 Editorial

Yesterday, the nation woke up to find that one of the historic buildings in the city had gone up in flames. At the time of its destruction it was home to the Ministry of Health and had established itself as one of the oldest buildings in the city.
It was home to Queen’s College before the school moved to its present location on Camp Street. It was also of an architecture that is fast becoming obsolete, given the concrete monstrosities that are going up in the city, each begging for air-conditioning and other artificial cooling systems.
But that is not the issue here. It is about the destruction of government buildings when there is a focus on the institution. The Ministry of Works building in Kingston went up in flames even as an investigation was being conducted.
A few years later, the Ministry of Housing was burnt down. Again there was an investigation.
But even before that, there was an attempt to blame elections protest for a fire that destroyed a building in the Ministry of Finance compound.
There was a similar attempt this time to link the fire to the protest action conducted by two trade unionists and a pardoned treason accused.

Yesterday, reporters asked the Health Minister whether there was an investigation or whether one was pending. His response was that the Audit Office had no interest in his Ministry at this time.
That may be the case but there have been mutterings about the expenditure on pharmaceuticals. Indeed the Health Ministry still procures pharmaceuticals for the Georgetown Public Hospital as well as for the various clinics and health centres. The sum appeared to be staggering, especially since at one time the Ministry did not need to go to the Central Tender Board and that Cabinet was the sole source of its authority.
That has changed although the Health Ministry is still allowed to single source. What really attracted attention was the fact that one supplier appeared to be the major beneficiary despite talks that this supplier was not the producer of most of the pharmaceuticals that it supplied.
On Wednesday, Minister Leslie Ramsammy corrected this view by first stating that the local supplier attracts no more than 50 per cent of the contracts.

Other suppliers would submit tenders and back away after the award of the tender. He also said that large pharmaceutical suppliers often find it not worth the while to supply Guyana. It would be a losing cause.
There are other suppliers who do win contracts and provide pharmaceuticals. These, according to Minister Ramsammy, account for about 48 per cent of the imported pharmaceuticals.
The fire will affect any investigation by people seeking to verify that there is no hanky panky in the supply of drugs to the medical institutions in this country.
This is where one must wonder whether the promise of technological improvements has been kept. With the advent of computers, storage and retrieval of information becomes so easy that there is even the possibility of saving the information in numerous locations.

The Minister of Health said that his Ministry’s records can be retrieved because these are in many other locations. However, we are certain that aspects of the computerisation were not pursued and as a result it is now certain that a lot of needed information would be lost.
Information on the procurement of pharmaceuticals may have been lost, and in the event of an investigation, the fire has put paid to any such retrieval of records. The Ministry of Finance should have some of the records because that is the funding agency. However, we all know that Guyana is dilatory when it comes to posting information.
A good should come out of all this though. Georgetown is a wooden city and it may be wise to have every Ministry and department store material of servers away from the Ministry, on flash drives and in the various other electronic forms because who knows which building could be the next to go up in flames.

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The fire and the halt to any investigation

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