By Ronald Daniels- Forgive me, but I would not call the President’s meeting yesterday [Wednesday, November 13, 2024] with errant contractors, permanent secretaries and ministers ‘no nonsense’. Simply put, it was a vulgar flexing of muscles by the President to quiet the noise of the public, reporters, and other stakeholders who have been rightly criticising substandard and incomplete works by numerous persons who have been awarded infrastructure contracts (however those awards were procured).
I worry about us as a society when we are drawn into these shallow public spectacles and equate them with a government serious about accountability. As Ronald Austin Jr. pointed out in his earlier post, the hallmark of any prudent leader is his ability to delegate. Square pegs can never fill round holes.
The award of most of these contracts properly should be through a transparent tender process. Despite the music that is sung, we would fall into the most calamitous error were we to believe that these processes are wholly or even substantively transparent.
Our culture is one where engines must be greased from the lowest to the highest levels of society to get anything done. Ours is a society characterized by widespread corruption at all levels. I dare repeat, at all levels. Our inability to prove this forensically does not make it any less true.
Where we get duped is when there are bold declarations that we are not corrupt, accompanied by the challenge for the accusers to prove it. Corruption is one of the most difficult things to prove, and especially when the socialisation is so entrenched that our methods of covering our tracks are sophisticated.
Those who go to the slaughter are the entry-level employee who is going to recklessly request a lunch money or small drops of oil for the engine; or the police officer who may be totally unaware of the social status of the driver he urges to ‘lef something’ so he can look the other way; or those who can conceive of no cleverer disguises than exorbitant gifts.
This is our society! This is what our naked Guyana is. And it is upon these foundations that we celebrate as ‘no nonsense’ what is nothing more or nothing less than smokescreen and vulgarity.
These contracts have deliverables in terms of the product, the quality of the product, the cost-margins within which the product must be produced, and the timelines for delivery of the various phases of the product.
They properly should have contingency provisions as well which cater for the deliverables being affected and what must be done to remedy same and by when. They have penalty clauses for breaches as well. They also fall within the purview of subject ministers who are supported by their respective permanent secretaries and engineers.
We are not dealing with school children here who need to be brought into line in an auditorium by a sharp-tongued headmaster. We are dealing with billions of dollars of taxpayers monies which ought to be accounted for through an intelligent system of checks and balances.
The real issue I imagine is that were most of these projects to be audited honestly and independently from award to the stage they are at it would bring us face to face who we are as a society. We may see how opaque these transparent processes we are.
It would be difficult for anyone to call upon anyone else from top to bottom to account in the proper way in circumstances like these. So, what we do instead? We just feed our society the gullible diet it has an insatiable appetite for.
