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‘Corruption will not go with the click of a finger’
– Ramotar touts improved evaluation of bids
With persistent talk about corruption in high places and accusations that he has failed to act on the problem during the first year of his presidency, Donald Ramotar is scratching his head for ideas, but says he will not act rashly simply to look good.
“We can’t say that one man can click a finger and stop it. We can probably make noise and try to make propaganda by going on the spot and those kinds of things, but the real way is to establish systems and close whatever gaps there are,” Ramotar told Kaieteur News.
President Donald Ramotar
He believes that one way is to strengthen the evaluation process by which multi-million-dollar contracts are handed out.
In a shocking revelation in mid-2011, the former Minister of Education, in defending a contract to the education sector, said that bid evaluators “don’t go and look” to see if bidders “have the capacity or the capability” to execute contracts they are awarded.
“I think probably we need a larger group of people to do evaluations when they are evaluating tenders,” Ramotar said last week.
“And you probably need a system of rotating people so that you do not have one set of people doing these things all the time,” he added.
Just a month into his presidency, Ramotar’s government fired contractor Makeshwar ‘Fip’ Motilall, in the midst of an ongoing controversy that he was incapable of executing a US$15.4 million contract to build the road to Amaila Falls, where the government intends to construct a hydropower plant.
But while he accepts the existence of corruption, Ramotar insists that it is not as bad as the opposition has been making it out to be. He said that one of the reasons that corruption has been a running headline is because it is a “potent political weapon in the hands of the opposition and they tend to magnify a lot of things.”
Ramotar said that the annual Auditor General’s report on the handling of the public purse could be used by the opposition to help the government expose and fight corruption, but instead is “being used as a tool to fight against us (the government).”
He said that what the media does not report are the “very clear” indications in the reports of the Auditor General, of marked improvements in the managing of public accounts.
“I am not trying to in any way belittle the problems that still exist; I don’t think you have a superman to come and stop it immediately, but we have to put in more systems in place.”
Ramotar suggested that there is need for stronger supervision and enhanced competence in middle management.
“To really bring an end to corruption, we have to not only have the system, but the system has to be managed and policed properly to ensure it works.”
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