Government plans to resuscitate the botched fibre optic cable project that was started under the former administration and Telecoms Minister Cathy Hughes says $100M will be spent to upgrade the link between Georgetown and Linden.
During her budget presentation in the National Assembly on Wednesday, Hughes said the development is intended to support widespread access to information and eGovernment Services.
Hughes noted that the previous administration spent some $1.2 billion on the project and then abandoned it.
“The lack of a feasibility study, poor planning, absence of effective project management and the use of inexperienced contractors are some of the major contributing factors that led to the failure of this project. We will move to correct all this so that the people of Guyana, regardless of their socio-economic status or remoteness will be digitally connected and socially included,” she added.
New Project Manager and head of the renamed Government Data Centre Floyd Levi had told Stabroek News in an interview that government was awaiting an analysis of the project to know if it had to be scrapped, since preliminary findings suggested that there were many breakages.
Based on what Levi said, a report on the project was expected to have been completed by the end of last month along with other physical and network infrastructure analysis to guide the David Granger administration on a way forward.
The laying of the fibre optic cable was part of a $3.1 billion E-governance project that commenced in January, 2011 and was supposed to be completed in 2012. However, several setbacks saw its completion delayed. In 2014, it was revealed by the then project manager Alexei Ramotar and then head of the presidential secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon that the cable laying, on which $1 billion had been spent, had been botched and would require approximately $2 billion to rehabilitate.
Levi said the evaluation team had reported on broken cables that were shallowly buried when they were required to be laid at least three feet underground. Others were scantily slung on poles and some left open on trails and roadways.
He said the blame for the shoddy work should not be laid on the contractors but on the project managers and engineering consultants who were to overlook the project. “To blame the contractors at this time would be premature… There was a project management team and they were required to ensure that the contractors performed in order for them to be paid,” he said.
Hughes said that overall, this year, government plans to invest $1,854,000 in supporting Information Communication Techno-logy-related activities and programmes through the eGovernment Unit.
