A proliferation of substandard contractors

Sep 05, 2013 Editorial

The government has found itself in a precarious position of having to retender for a number of projects ever so often. Someone looking in from the outside would get the impression that the government is engaging in starts and stops. Better yet, the view is that the government is pursuing development by trial and error.
From as far back as one has been looking at the development of social infrastructure, the government has been known to cancel projects, offer explanations to the nation, then go back to tender for the project.
There was the project to re-route the pipelines for the Marriott Hotel project. Courtney Benn Contracting Services won the tender and actually imported most of the material. The company began to work, employing large pieces of machinery. After a short while, the government pulled the plug on the project.
President Bharrat Jagdeo later told the local media that Guyana had lost the skills capability to even dig some drains and to lay sewer lines. Of course, this could not have been true. The president might have concluded Guyana had lost its skills capability but certainly not to lay sewer lines.
In the end, another contractor undertook the sewer redirection; the contract had been re-allocated. In this case it was not advertised. But the same could not be said for some other projects. There was the Amaila Falls road project. In the first instance the contract was awarded to Makeshwar ‘Fip’ Motilall but after nearly two years that contract was revoked.
If one thought that they had seen the end of the retendering; then one needed to think again. Some of the lots tendered for had to be taken back from the contractor. In one case the contractor did not have equipment to undertake the project. In another, one simply could not mobilize the resources. Since then, the government has had to tender at least twice for some of the sections.
It was the same stop and start for the four-lane highway project on East Coast Demerara. The government awarded a contract to someone who had undertaken government projects in the past. Not all the contracts were duly executed but the government kept granting contracts to these people. So it was with the road project.
The contractor failed miserably in the early stages and the government was forced to retender for the same project on two other occasions.
One observation is how much retendering costs the government. The practice is usually to advance the contractor what is considered a mobilization fee. The contractors use this money which is often more than the work they would undertake on the project. In the vast majority of cases the government is not known to recover any money and this is often repeated by the Auditor General in his reports.
Take the construction of the new Skeldon Sugar Factory. The initial contract was won by a Chinese company. This company never completed the project to expectation and since then, the government has been seeking contractor after contractor to bring the project to completion.
In the face of serious questioning, the government would talk about introducing the penalty phase of the project but this is hardly ever done. Instead, a new contractor is hired and paid as if he is undertaking the project for the first time.
In many countries unless contractors prove their worth they are not awarded contracts. The view in Guyana is that the economy is too small and certain projects are too insignificant to attract foreign skilled contractors. The result is that the government must work with what is available and these are often those contractors who are prepared to bluff their way through project after project, learning by trial and error.
So what is the answer to the present problems? For one the government must be prepared to act indiscriminately. It should not treat some contractors as though they occupy favoured position and are allowed to escape sanctions for flawed work while others are penalized. There is need, too, to recognize incompetence among those who profess to know what needs to be done.

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A proliferation of substandard contractors

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