Flaws in the design for the Brickdam lock-up, which would have rendered it airless, have forced government to set aside money for remedial works, Minister of Public Security Khemraj Ramjattan has said.
“In a prison system you have to have a perfect design to aerate if you are not going to make it air-conditioned and there was some problem with that initially… The contractor told us that with the money he had to complete the thing, he did it exactly to specification, but… we can’t put prisoners there. We will kill them,” Ramjattan said in response to questions from Stabroek News. Ramjattan, the AFC leader was hosting bi-weekly press conference at the party’s headquarters.
Last weekend, acting Police Commissioner David Ramnarine said that the expansion was “dragging on for too long and this situation is taxing the force’s scarce resources to shuttle detainees, including high-profile suspects, to other facilities on a daily basis.”
It is clear that a lot of work has already been done but there has been no activity there for some time.
Asked if there was a problem with the previous contractor, Ramjattan revealed that there was a problem with the chosen design.
He said the trouble now is that remedial works will have to be done.
He said a similar situation exists at the forensic lab. “Indeed yes we are getting there. It is going to be somewhat slow…it looks monumental [but] it is going to be done,” he said. According to Ramjattan, the Brickdam facility has been “troublesome for a number of years now.” He said under this year’s budget, corrective work is to be done. “After we got the allocation in the 2016 budget, we immediately put it out to tender and three persons tendered and then it went to the National Tender Board … [which] had a huge set of contracts to deal with and it got a little delayed there. When it was determined…, the National Tender Board said all three bidders were non responsive [so] it had to come back to the evaluation committee which then sent back to these various bidders…. At the end of the day only one person rebid. That now is with the National Tender Board.”
He expressed hope that the contract will be awarded before December 31, so that the money allocated this year could be given to the contractor to complete the expansion.
Ramjattan said that the issue with the bidding process was just one of the “impediments, difficulties and challenges we would have.” He said the Minister of Finance had indicated that the public sector investment programme had its problems. “We did a lot of allocations in this 2016 budget but somehow the bottlenecks in those areas that must be adhered to… are causing huge problems to the extent that [they are] delaying and stifling the process for the spending of money.”
He said prior to the allocation being made this year for the lock-up, it had been hung up for several years.
At a news conference at Eve Leary last Saturday, Ramnarine lamented that there is no clear indication of when the works, which have been ongoing for years, would be completed.
“When you have to eke out scarce mobile resources and manpower every day to traverse long distances to detain suspects at other facilities… one can understand the challenges and the reconfiguration… of that lock-up has been dragging on for too long,” Ramnarine said, while calling for the works to be expedited. Noting that over the years ‘A’ Division has had to deal with over 60% of the reports of serious crimes, he said that the burden of moving serious crime suspects to other lock-ups on a daily basis is “one we have been bearing with tremendous patience over the years.”
He later used the opportunity to urge the officials concerned to “spare no effort” to make the much needed facility available once more.
Stabroek News was able to confirm that the lock-up, which has been the subject of controversy over the years because of its deplorable and inhumane state, is not currently being used for detentions.
