Contracting Roads

Nov 06, 2011 Editorial

With the campaigning politicians of all stripes venturing into every nook and cranny of the country we hope they have taken notice of most works being done by contractors in our communities. Something is surely rotten in the state of Guyana when it comes to contractors and the quality of work they deliver.
The sums deployed towards rehabilitating or building infrastructure routinely runs into the billions of dollars. Even factoring in our depressed currency, we are still talking about real money – and these are not even counting the mega contracts such as conservancies or sugar factories.
The problem with the contracts is that they are almost uniformly so poorly executed that within a short interval, the jobs have to be done all over again. And guess who are hired to fix the initial shoddily-done jobs? The same contractors that messed up in the first instance. And the cycle of spending and fixing continues – evidently ad infinitum, because no one in authority seems to mind. Or, as has been suggested, they have been induced to look the other way.
Our newspaper has been in the forefront of identifying some of these shoddy and overpriced jobs and we hope that the politicians will go beyond their ritualistic condemnations and outline clearly how they will rectify this obnoxious situation.
The worse offenders – or at least the most visible and the most annoying – are the contractors that are hired to repair or build our roads, not the major “highways” but the yet crucial ones that branch off into the communities as well as the streets of those communities. Check with any community – and horror stories will pour out without much (or any) prompting about roads that were fixed three or four times over the past several years only to have them literally washed away after the following rainy season.
The same situation can be analogised to bridges, canals, sea-walls, playfields, pavilions etc. This campaign during the rainy season should hopefully focus the attention of the political elite on the problem.
The question that comes to mind is what has happened to the system where the contractor is provided with bills of materials and other such specifications to ensure that the work will be up to a stipulated standard? What has happened to the system where an engineer from the government is supposed to sign off on all completed work before payment is disbursed? If the system is still in place then a whole lot of people need to be fired because for sure, we the long suffering people of Guyana are not getting value for our money.
When Dr Cheddi Jagan was around, a favourite recommendation of his was for the local communities that are supposed to benefit from projects to organise themselves as watchdog committees to ensure that standards were upheld. Somewhere along the line, the ball has been dropped on this excellent mechanise to enforce accountability on the part of contractors.
We hope that the politicians have decided that the people cannot oversee their own development. If the answer is “no” then they ought to sensitise the local communities from their platforms on what is expected of them.
This will eliminate the possibility of them agitating later in protest of work not being done according to standards. It will also build grassroots democracy by demonstrating in the most practical way the two way traffic in responsibility and authority that defines true democracy.
There are widespread suspicions that corruption is at the base of the scandal in the execution of contracts signed by the government. This cynicism is only intensified in the light (or darkness?) of the deafening silence and denials of those in positions of authority. This cannot continue. The citizens of this country are being wrung out to dry coming and going: first when they get no lasting benefit from the project and in effect continue without the service that was supposed to be delivered and secondly when they will have to repay the loans – with interest.
Contractors must shape up- the next government must ensure that they ship out.

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