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Feigning impotency, pretending at accountability

May 04, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) is struggling to shake off the stain that sticks to it with that $865M Tepui pump station contract award.  NPTAB is only making matters worse for itself, made to look even more distasteful when weak defenses are offered to rationalize what happened.  The Cabinet failed in its duty to be the evaluator of last resort, when the no-objection process came up for approval.  From all indications, the Cabinet saw itself as a rubberstamp, even part of a fixing scheme that ensured the contract was awarded to one and only one recipient.

As much as the PPPC Government may wiggle and weave to cover stories, the Tepui contract award reeks of a political and bureaucratic cook-up, the smell of which sickens.  The Public Procurement Commission (PPC) was expected to be a sturdy line of defense, to sit in keen post scrutiny of awards like this $865M pump station to a group that was clearly unqualified and condemn it, but ducked.  The PPC had to be honest and fearless in calling the Tepui award for what it was: an insult to any tender process, a mockery of claims about accountability.

There is a growing consensus that the PPC now has little credibility and that the more it puts up public defenses, the more laughable it looks, the more damage is inflicted upon itself and its less than clean deliberations.  The National Drainage and Irrigation Authority (NDIA), the procuring entity, now stands besmirched.  The NDIA looks like a clever playing along agency fused in some type of partnership with those identified in this contract fixing, and less of a procuring one insistent on getting the best people to get the most value from that $865M award.

Not one of those involved parties mentioned above, all of them saddled with some degree of evaluation responsibility, had it in them to stand in objection and reject the Tepui bid that was so egregiously lacking.  Not the suspect NPTAB, not the powerful Cabinet, not the next layer of accountability, the self-trashing PPC, and not the strangely unseeing and uncaring NDIA which had a vested interest in getting people who know what they are doing, and have the backing to prove (it), to get a proper pump station job completed.  Guyanese do not need any special insight to interpret what went on with that $865M Tepui pump station contract award.

It was extraordinary how all the components in the PPPC Government meshed and clicked in perfect alignment to ensure that there was only one outcome, one winner of that pump station bid.  The Cabinet and the PPC look the worst of the lot because when the brakes had to be applied, more gas was given.  The Cabinet needed no high-level technical expertise to refuse its no-objection, for what was escalated from NPTAB was so shabby, even sordid.  The PPC, operating after the fact, settled for a touchy-feely approach, and with a sugarcoated report to complete the circle of what gleams of a prearranged scheme and the fix that resulted.  Former Auditor General, Anand Goolsarran, was blunt: the NPTAB is not a post office limited to receiving documents, but of so much more significance.  Even in its self-appointed capacity as a village post office, it was just about closed for business, since it did so little, so poorly, with what was placed in its hands.

Regarding the PPC, apparently some of its members see their primary functions as those of funeral directors.  Because what the PPC did was whitewash that all but dead $865M Tepui pump station contract award and hustled to bury it under an avalanche of verbal perfume.  The award stinks so much that even the PPC’s best efforts at spraying embalming fluids did nothing to diminish its putrid state.  In fact, most of that embalming fluid spilled on the PPC and scarred its members pretending at impotency and, it could be said, some level of asininity. Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo tried his hand at some damage control, but of all people he ought to know that some things are beyond salvaging.  The big question is how many more such contract awards were finalized and Guyanese in the dark.

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