The Opposition has lambasted the state of public procurement in the country, pointing out that the early morning meeting that the President held yesterday with his Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, engineers and contractors, has confirmed and exposed that the public procurement system is in a mess.
In a statement this morning the People’s National Congress Reform said the public witnessed firsthand the level of chaos that has become endemic within the entire PPP administration.
Opposition and PNC Reform Leader, Aubrey Norton said the entire public procurement system is in a planning and execution crisis and hundreds of billions of dollars of the people’s money is at stake, and in many cases is being wasted.
“President Ali and his government must take full responsibility for these massive failures in the management of public funds. To fix such failures, a clean and competent government would have spent time to review system capacities, resources availability, its policies and approaches, legislation and institutions, the performance of supply chains, operation bottlenecks, and the role and extent of corruption. But the corrupt PPP is no such government,” Mr. Norton said.
The Opposition Leader said the President should have analyzed the root causes of the problem and propose solutions rather than embarrass the contractors and officials that his Government put in place to oversee the public projects.
“The monitoring and evaluation system has become politicized and dysfunctional. This growing wastage of financial resources through negligence, incompetence, and corruption is one of the main symptoms of the Natural Resource Curse. The more oil revenues the government spends, the greater will be this curse,” the PNC/R said.
For its part, the Alliance For Change, (AFC) said that the problems in procurement should be placed squarely at the feet of the government the procurement entities especially NPTAB.
The party said that a perusal of contract awards recommended by NPTAB demonstrates an inequitable distribution where mostly government aligned persons are benefitting. This, the party said, is the root cause of the problem as persons would believe they do not need to account because of their closeness to the government.
“These practices are fostering the inequality of opportunities for the population in construction and services in oil rich Guyana, where billions are expended for procurement, most notably in construction projects. And it is clear that a small percentage of the chosen elite benefit from government procurement- the lion share is concentrated and allocated to the few while the masses are given the crumbs in manual labour contracts. Are all groups benefiting equally from Guyana’s oil revenues?,” the AFC said in a statement.
The AFC said the procurement system is at an all time low and the country could face massive infrastructure failure if the status quo remains.
During the 5:30am meeting, the President lashed out at a number of his Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Engineers and contractors for the many delays in Government projects. Almost every Ministry had multiple projects that have either been delayed or stalled. The President has threatened to take action against the errant parties.
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