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Blacklisted contractors
(Kaieteur News) – One of the most glaring segments of budget wastage, corruption excess on steroids, and continuing PPPC Government failures is its cohort of contractors. A cohort made up of performing and delivering contractors, as well as subsets made up of unqualified contractors, delinquent contractors, nonperforming contractors, and cheating and corrupt contractors.
They look for every loophole in a system setup to favour them, then take the fullest advantage of the billions in taxpayer dollars that they grab using a variety of schemes. Minister of Agriculture, Zulfikar Mustafa, was given the dubious honour of sharing with the nation how serious the PPPC Government is about contract lapses and failures by contractors. Thirty contractors blacklisted from any further participation in government awarded contracts for any public works projects.
Thirty contractors blacklisted may sound like a huge development, but that’s a drop in the contractor bucket. With hundreds of billions of dollars budgeted for new building and rehabilitating of old structures, contractors in Guyana are like a small army by themselves. A small army within a closed PPPC Government circle of insiders, but a circle wielding power that outweighs its size. In a nutshell, contractors are the darlings among PPPC Government friends and are prominent in those favored by leaders. When 30 contractors are blacklisted for life, that sounds like breaking news of major proportions. But is it really so? Some more questions should help to parse through this cancerous area which costs Guyanese taxpayers so much, and pushes more qualified contractors out of the bidding.
Who are the 30 blacklisted contractors? The government will make a big production, with these 30 blacklisted contractors, as evidence that it is moving against the whole group, whatever their delinquency. Why is Minister Mustafa so resistant to naming them, so that the people whose money pays them, Guyanese taxpayers, have the clearest idea who the contractors are? Who are the principals, the projects on which they failed to perform per contract specifications, and the total cost to the country? Announcing that 30 contractors have been blacklisted is a good step, but only the first one. One question that observers and citizens is sure to ask is: why not name them, so that they can be recognised as either major or medium scale contractors, or minnows in the contractor field? If the delinquent 30 is a batch of peripheral players in contract award schemes of the PPPC Government, then any celebration of government’s seriousness is premature. More about getting the most mileage of what looks like an inspiring development, but one which hasn’t moved to any material degree. And leaving a door open, so that they can rebrand themselves and do more damage.
When citizens are informed of the identities of those contractors that failed in honouring their obligations, they may be able to figure out if they matter at all, and how often they featured in the contract failures that have haunted contract awards and contract fulfillment. Were they eligible in the first place? If they weren’t, then where did the procurement apparatus fall down on the job, and why?
A question that Minister Mustafa should give serious consideration to is: how many in lost contract millions combined, and/or the extra dollars to hire replacement contractors, did the blacklisted 30 charge against the Treasury? If the total number of them involved is limited to that 30, the hit to the Treasury should still be substantial, and calls for the specifics of identification and more clarity.
The next question would be what is the government doing to recover those millions, with that process also being publicly ventilated. The contract for the $865M Belle Vue pump station saw the Tepui, Inc., group being advanced close to $182M, with less than a third of the work completed. Will there be genuine efforts to recover that fairly large sum from that contract, and the amounts collected by others that failed?
It is an encouraging sign that government may have embarked on what’s a groundbreaking step with blacklisting. But blacklisting cannot be all that happens, when there are so many millions overall involved. Recovery efforts must follow. If not, then is this how the millions are advanced, then shared among government insiders.
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