The President and the contractors

The fact that President Irfaan Ali choose, recently, to convene a forum at which to ‘reason with’ local building contractors who are either involved in the execution of state contracts or hope to secure such contracts in the future, is, on the basis of what has been revealed in the media, a good sign. The President’s decision to meet with the contractors, one assumes, is linked to his government’s expectations of the sector in the context of what he anticipates will be the country’s broader development direction in the period ahead and the role that building contractors will have to play therein. Building, if we read the ‘tea leaves’ correctly, will be central to the broader ‘going forward’ process in what, these days, is loosely described as the oil and gas era and the message which the President appears to have sought to send to the contractors is that in the matter of honouring the contracts associated particularly, though not exclusively, within the stipulated completion time frames, our contractors are going to have to ‘get their act together.’

The President himself will not be, given the experience of his previous ministerial dispensation, unfamiliar with what, frequently, is the idiosyncratic work ethic of some of our contractors. Nor, one might add, would he be oblivious to the fact that the attitude of contractors to honouring ‘time lines’ and other contractual stipulations, are, in many instances, reflective of a multifaceted culture of falsification and fudging that has become par for the course in the sector. Indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in the matter of the ‘arrangements’ that attend state-financed construction contracts, underhandedness appears to have reached the level of a scourge. What would have been similar kinds of challenges in an earlier dispensation, ought to better position the President to respond to the current situation than if he had come to the table a ‘greenhorn’ in such matters.

To dwell for a while on what one might call the anomalous culture that pervades building contracts that are financed with state funds it has to be said that under political administrations, across dispensations, irregularities in the administration of state-funded construction contracts, had become the order of the day. No political administration in the post-independence history of Guyana can honestly deny that state-funded building contracts have, over the years, been one of the favoured ‘milch cows’ through which political gifts are doled out. Nor can it be denied that an embedded culture of corruption involving some state administrators charged with overseeing the various aspects of both the awarding and execution of construction contracts have carved out niches of irregularity sufficiently convoluted in their nature to evade official detection since, all too frequently, it is the gatekeepers themselves who are, simultaneously, beneficiaries from such thievery.

If this editorial does not, by any means, begin with the assumption that the President’s recent meeting with the contractors falls into the familiar ‘window-dressing,’ image-burnishing category at which governments, over time, have become barefacedly expert, but which, these days, have minimal real public traction, it seeks to send a message to the President that if, others having failed miserably before him, he manages to begin a process of rolling back the unquestioned culture of corruption that has long pervaded state-funded construction contracts, then he would have done the taxpayers of the Republic a considerable service. If, however, his administration is perceived, down the road, to have been indifferent to the persistence of the anomalies in areas such as the awarding of contracts and blatant collusion between state officials and private contractors to ‘cream off’ millions upon millions of dollars under a range of carefully contrived selfserving schemes, then neither he nor his administration can cry foul if and when they are ‘called out’ by the nation.