Painting over rust

Oct 21, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – If the Vice President of Guyana genuinely believes that the first step in honouring the promise of procurement reform is to launch an online platform to advertise public tenders and invitations to bid, then we might as well call the West Indies cricket team and schedule a trial match to solve the region’s long-standing cricketing woes.

The idea is, at once, almost comedic and a direct insult to the intelligence of any citizen with a rudimentary grasp of procurement corruption. To herald such a digital novelty as the launching salvo of a comprehensive overhaul is to mistake the mere flipping of a switch for meaningful governance.

Access to tender advertisements has never been the problem. Citizens and companies could always see which public projects were slated for procurement. The real rot lies elsewhere, in the system’s notorious brevity of notice. Tenderers are often given as little as two weeks to prepare their bids. This is hardly enough time to marshal the requisite paperwork or engage competent engineers.

Meanwhile, those blessed by the capricious fates of inside information, often courtesy of the unscrupulous public officials, are granted an unfair advantage. They know where the projects will be, when they will be, and which contractors might already have an inside track. This is not conspiracy theory; it is the whispered folklore of engineers, contractors and businessman who have ever tried to compete honestly in a field rigged by privilege.

The grapevine brims with tales of insiders who, for the benefit of their bourgeois friends, leak information on where to buy land, which projects are imminent, and how to exploit the public coffers. This is not transparency. This is the art of theft, executed with bureaucratic flourish. In such a context, establishing a digital platform to post tenders is akin to teaching a cat to bark: amusing, irrelevant, and utterly pointless.

A government serious about reform would begin by revising the Public Procurement Act to vest real power in the Public Procurement Commission (PPC). This should include the power to cancel contracts, to sanction illegal awards, and to stand up to those who treat the public purse as a personal ATM. At present, the PPC resembles a toothless poodle.

Further, the evaluation of bids should be conducted by panels independent of domestic influence. Especially for major projects there should be experts and entities from outside the jurisdiction undertaking the evaluation of bids. It will cost a tad more but corruption costs much more

Prequalification rules must be scrutinised to ensure that they do not institutionalise favouritism, especially in the health sector. Equally, bid security must be made meaningful: bonds without collateral are a farce, allowing firms and insurance companies to operate with impunity, and sometimes, with reckless disregard for the public interest.

And the mobilisation fees—the “seed capital” handed to contractors before work commences—deserve special censure. In some cases, these fees are so exorbitant that they provide the perfect opportunity for a contractor to abscond with public funds before a single brick is laid. Subsidising contractors in this way is not reform; it is financial folly dressed up as administration.

Yet here we are, in 2025, with a Vice President announcing that the government’s grand reform initiative begins with something it tried before and discarded: an online portal for tender advertisement. One is tempted to marvel at the audacity, or the sheer comedic timing, of this declaration.

The country’s procurement system is opaque, uneven, and riddled with avenues for favouritism. Its problems are structural, legal, and procedural. And yet the government’s solution is to post the same announcements online that it has posted for decades in newspapers. It is not the advertisements that are the problem; it is what happens after.

If this is the best the People’s Progressive Party/Civic can do to honour the promise of procurement reform, then the nation is being taken for a ride. The digital portal is a fig leaf, a token gesture in the face of decades of mismanagement. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of painting over rust: visually satisfying, but structurally meaningless. Real reform would be substantive, enforceable, and fearless, not a rebranding of yesterday’s abandoned idea.

Launching a website is not reform. It is not vision. It is not courage. It is a digital plaster sent to a nation waiting—patiently, if increasingly incredulously—for leadership capable of doing more than tinkering at the edges. In other words, it is an insult, a farce, and, sadly, the latest act in a long-running drama of bureaucratic comedy.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• advertise, painting, Peeping Tom, public tenders, rust

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