After an initial agreement on the nominees for the Public Procurement Commission (PPC), the APNU+AFC has changed one of its nominees.
Economist Rawle Lucas, who was initially nominated by the coalition, has been replaced by Diana Rajcumar.
During yesterday’s meeting of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the members were informed that Lucas had been replaced by Rajcumar after discussions between the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) Leader Aubrey Norton and Alliance for Change (AFC) Leader Khemraj Ramjattan.
It is believed that the disagreements within the coalition resulted in last Monday’s PAC meeting being cancelled. When asked if this was the case, PAC Chairman Jermaine Figueira would only say that the leadership of his party was still discussing their representatives for the five-member commission.
However, he stated that with an agreement in place, a motion will be moved at the next PAC meeting on Monday, for the names to be accepted and forwarded to the National Assembly.
He is positive that when the motion is moved it will receive the needed approval to send the names to the National Assembly.
When PAC member Gail Teixeira at a recent statutory meeting had suggested that the PNCR would probably want to have a say in the nominees, Figueira had upbraided her as he posited that the internal affairs of the major party in the APNU+AFC coalition should not be of any interest to her.
At that time there was back and forth between the two, who are members of a subcommittee mandated to expedite the process of selecting members to sit on the currently defunct commission.
“The opposition is ready for this to be set up, and I strongly believe that the government is pussyfooting around the issue and it is time we bring this to finality and stop grandstanding around what is happening in the affairs of the PNC—that is not the government’s business. We are here at the Public Accounts Committee to bring finality to the issue of appointing the Commissioners to sit on the Public Procurement Commission. What the opposition decides is the opposition’s business,” Figueira had said emphatically. But Teixeira responded by saying that her comments were mere thoughts.
The other nominees of the committee are attorney Pauline Chase, economist Joel Bhagwandin, Rajnarine Singh for the PPP/C, and Berkley Wickham of the APNU+AFC Coalition.
Several months ago, former PPC Chairwoman Carol Corbin voiced her concern that crucial reform work done by the commission could be in jeopardy if the body was not reconstituted quickly.
It is unclear if there have been protests from bidders over contract awards made last year as it was the PPC that would have informed on the number of cases it had received.
In October 2016, and more than 13 years after Guyana’s Constitution was amended to provide for the PPC, the procurement oversight body was established. Corbin, Sukrishnalall Pasha, Emily Dodson, Ivor English and former Minister of Labour, Nanda Kishore Gopaul, were the first commissioners.
The life of the last commission expired in October 2020.
