Picket local entities if you must

Sep 22, 2018 Letters

Dear Editor,
Reference is made to the letter, “Citizens affected by internationally funded road projects should utilise grievance mechanisms” in 20/09/2018 Stabroek News, by an unknown letter writer.
While the writer, seemingly in defence and on behalf of the IDB, was at pains to have ordinary citizens make contact directly with the responsible agencies to air their grievances. But, I urge citizens to continue writing to the press and airing their grievances on television and any medium possible, and to even engage in peaceful protest actions at government departments, IDB office and Chinese Embassy. Guyanese are totally fed up with substandard work on donor and non-donor projects, and the Chinese, and going the route of discrete reporting methods is an archaic approach.
All that letter writer needs to do is to pick up the information, as he/she has clear knowledge of the system, and simply copy and paste it into the reporting box!
The East Coast road and the Sheriff Street projects are not the first major road projects which have suffered from poor construction, supervision and deficient environmental management. Guyana has a long legacy of these scandals. The 1994 Essequibo Coastal road scandal, the early 2000s East Bank Highway and to a lesser extent the recently completed West Demerara road projects are three which have suffered wanton abuse by contractors, supervisors, regulatory agencies and government officials. And we are not even discussing construction of schools and other public buildings!
Contractors do not underbid for environmental and safety measures in bid documents, what they do is to siphon off monies from these line items to increase profit margins and where necessary, fund kickbacks to senior officials.
So with limited enforcement by government agencies contractors have in the past blatantly disregarded the wider public by enforcing cruel construction methods and crude traffic management techniques during the construction stage.
With a coup d’état among agencies responsible for monitoring and supervising, we have had projects generate significant social distress and environmental damage for decades.
Back to the East Coast road project, with construction spread out in such large sections, and the contractor spread so thin, they are unable to manage the massive traffic back up. So, for example persons travelling form Buxton and beyond, into Georgetown, suffer the brunt of this poorly executed the road project.
Worse yet if that traveller is now heading through the Sheriff-Mandela road to the East Bank! Had the responsible agencies ensure smaller sections were fully completed before moving on, we would not have had these issues of traffic, but then again where will the money be creamed from!
Some of the other fallout issues from this East Coast road contract include diversions to the embankment road, which put severe stress and significant damage to several village roads connecting these two parallel major roads, and with no improvement to those roads envisaged.
There is also no sense of timing, and little work at nights. Drivers suffer such huge time delays whilst queuing, that their petrol bills have had significant increases, and most get to work late and stressed. This has reduced worker productivity and more so at a time when companies need every saving to keep their business profitable. We have grown to accept the poor performance of the public sector, so this clearly does not impact the public sector!
So what were are seeing today is a frustrated public with pent up anger over the last few decades of a previously corrupt administration, and are now caught in an apparent downward spiral in which the current government had campaigned to fix.
However, Guyana is heading towards the famous saying where “the more things change the more they remain the same”.
Complicating matters is that we have brought the worst foreign contractors in the form of Chinese, notorious for their substandard work worldwide. They offer nothing in improving the local standards of engineering or implementing any level of environmental standards.
The Chinese are only good at building open and new projects where nothing previously existed, but I will always be wary of their quality of work. One hope it is not the governments’, both past and current consummate relationship with the Chinese that has led to no action thus far!
Yours sincerely,
M. Lall

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