Auditor General’s report silent on controversial Bamia school...
inclusion projects; repairing several schools across the region at Linden Foundation, MacKenzie High, etcetera. This was just to ensure that we spent the monies allocated for this single project”.
The Chairman said that these monies were approved to spearhead several other projects instead of being returned to the Ministry of Finance to be spent this year (2024).
And now, with the incompletion of the project, it will be a rollover this year and Adams lamented that this will be disadvantageous to the region since other projects will have to be stalled.
“Which is practically denying the region the opportunity to focus on new projects”.
“They will then put back another hundred and something millions of our 2024 budget for that same project to the disadvantage of the region because that money would have been allocated for another project, maybe the construction of another school. So, it kind of affects the region in a big way because when we were supposed to be cutting the ribbon in July, I should say, we are now going to see this project going the entire 2024, I should say”, the Regional Chairman highlighted.
“To be honest with you, I don’t see that project finishing till 2025, and that is the most unfortunate thing. And that’s what happens when you give projects to friends, family and favourites, who are inexperienced people who have never built something of this magnitude but you award it because they are aligned with you and completely placed an entire
region in this conundrum, we have found ourselves in,” he told this publication last year December.
Adams noted that whatever explanation is given now cannot suffice for their inability to do a project.
He further confirmed that a formal letter was written by the company to the council on November 2, 2023, and the explanations that were given were the same as when the first deadline was breached. These are the lack of materials, workers and other issues. All issues which contractors across the country face.
Thus far, the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development has been tightlipped on the matter.