Consultant threatens to expose deficiency in Agri. projects

Oct 30, 2016 News

Incompetence is not something that is easily addressed. This assertion was made recently by Engineering Consultant, Charles Ceres, as he raised concerns with those tasked with evaluating projects within the Ministry of Agriculture.

Charles Ceres, Engineering Consultant

Ceres was forced to enunciate his concerns about the work of the Ministry after he was turned down for a contract despite having the suitable requirements. The Ministry had invited bids for consultants to supervise the reconstruction works to the north-eastern dam of the East Demerara Water Conservancy.
However, it wasn’t until he decided to protest a correspondent from the Ministry that indicated that he did not qualify for the project that the Ministry offered a revised response indicating that Ceres’s company – Ground Structures Engineering Consultants Inc. – had in fact met the requirements.
Ceres said that he did not alter his bid in any way to warrant the Ministry’s revision. He has chalked up the development to a situation whereby the evaluators were either biased or incompetent. Ceres is seeking answers about the state of affairs and hopes for the intervention of the World Bank too.
As if accusing those within the Ministry of being biased and incompetent was not enough, Ceres is prepared to go one step further and highlight instances of incompetence in other projects executed by the very Ministry.
Ceres told media operatives that every week he intends to examine a project being done by the said Ministry and identify all of the technical deficiencies until his concerns are dealt with. He claims to already have information about two projects that he intends to highlight shortly.
According to him, the situation involving his bid seems to be a clear case of incompetence. “I want the public to know…these people must either be moved or go and develop the competence that is required,” said Ceres. He, however, said that incompetence can only be addressed if persons have the ambition to learn.
Ceres noted that while the answers he seeks from the Ministry are imperative, of greater importance is the need for the incompetence of the people handling evaluations to be taken into consideration and that they be removed from the evaluation committee.
“The people who they have ranked ahead of us are two consultants who collectively could not supervise the approach to the Hope canal bridges…They don’t have five percent of the technical capabilities we have. We have a comprehensive geotechnical laboratory with every single element of equipment they identified to do this project, and we have had this for in excess of five years,” Ceres asserted.
He noted that he had cause to be suspicious of the evaluation process. “That must be indicative of bias. If it is not bias it is indicative of the inability to comprehend what they are doing,” the Engineer added.

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