A commissioner to oversee public projects worthy of consideration

Dear editor,

AS day follows night, three things are crystal clear as it relates to the execution of government projects: (1) they hardly finish on time; they always incur significant cost overruns or variation; and each party to the contract blames the other for this lack of performance.

The reasons for this state of tardiness are mostly due, but not limited to the following: inadequate construction details in the Bills of Quantities; lack of detailed construction drawings at time of tendering; diverting Mobilisation Advance to other uses, rather than what it was intended for by the contractor; untimely delays in submission of detailed drawings during construction; contractors slow work progress because of involvement in other projects; slow responses from consultant for modifications and variations during construction; delays in dealing with progress payments; variation works not quantified before execution; indiscriminate use of contingency fund; infrequent site meetings; poor standard of work by contractors, that requires extra time for rectification; poor project supervision by the subject ministry’s engineer and consultant; and red flags raised long after the fact of time and costly overruns.
This tardiness and underperformance have a lot to do with the dynamics of the parties involved in the government contracts and their dependence on each other, vis-à-vis approval of payment, certifying as built quantities, etc.

It might be advisable to have an independent Commissioner of Projects that can monitor these big government projects from the point of the tender documents to project completion, to ensure that the defects mentioned above are rectified in a timely manner

The President has identified some mega projects on his to-do list for his first term such as the fixed-span Demerara River Bridge; a gas-to-shore power-generation plant; the Ogle to Diamond highway; the Parika to Vreed-en-Hoop highway and the bridge to link with Suriname. To achieve a full measure of success it might be prudent to have an independent Commissioner of Projects reporting directly to him to provide the necessary drive and oversight.

Yours Sincerely,
Reggie Bhagwandin