Dear Editor,
According to SN’s editorial of October 14, 2024, titled. “Procurement integrity and the Belle Vue contract” President Ali had something to say about procurement. “Amongst the initiatives implemented to strengthen public procurement since returning to Office, the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board has conducted an extensive review of all standard bidding documents and finalized a new set of bidding documents.” Good. “Let me say we are the first to recognize that the tender system requires further modernization and reform…” Better still, sire. “Let us be the first to acknowledge that we must build a paperless system, a system that is less reliant on human interference, a system in which public accountability continues to be open and transparent.” Excellent, liege. Now for some kind thoughts.
All of those initiatives, strategies, practices in motion, there is still one seminal element missing, glaringly so. To Excellency Ali and to all Guyana, this I assert: the people to make these components harmonize and synthesize are missing. When some of the same twisted folks are still in place at key points, then what to expect, other than the corruption, as usual. Very pointedly, the system, any system, is only as good as the minds guiding it, the hands involved in it. More bluntly, resident corruption officers still allow the further festering of more corruption. President Ali’s “initiatives” ring sweetly, but there are those around them that have repeatedly failed this country. The record is there, and it is only what has trickled out under the poorest of circumstances. The Belle Vue project is just the tip of the snake pit.
Unhappily, the president is a man given to misleading himself (“public accountability continues to be open and transparent”). When openness and transparency started is a mystery, probably part of the sorcery conjured in the head and his head stewards at Office of the President. Hence, “continues” is mis-said and misplaced. I can visualize the diplomatic corps furiously stirring the ice in their spirits. Somebody at OP should tell President Ali (respectfully, of course) that that one about transparency is as stale as flat beer that has not one bubble left in it. It smells, too.
Moreover, as Guyanese know very well by now, President Ali is not one to ease up on his irrationality, hold a card in reserve. He gushes and Guyanese get rashes (or the rushes). “We are not about hiding our heads away from challenges and problems, we are about confronting issues, confronting problems, but more importantly, finding the solution and building the institution to support the development trajectory of our country.” Whatever the manner and results of “confronting issues, confronting problems,” they have been huge secrets to Guyanese. The corruption in public procurement continues, and the PPP Government has been a textbook of dissembling, deception, and dodging. There was a pump station, then there was a wharf, then there were those others that are still unknown and still not spoken about. When too many unscrupulous agents of the State stand in charge of the disposition of hundreds of billions of dollars, then only a certain outcome could be expected. Expectations have been confirmed by reality.
Next, said the president now warming to his task: “since our assumption of office, a new Public Procurement Commission has been appointed, and that entity has been discharging its important constitutional function in a rigorous and thorough manner.” Don’t make Guyanese laff. The Procurement Commission is not an investigative mechanism. The Procurement Commission is a defensive apparatus. Translation: When PPP agents are in trouble, the Procurement Commission majority’s job is to transform into a formidable midwife of interference to extract comrades from their dark places and wash them down. The Procurement Commission has lived up to the PPP Government’s visions and expectations in that it has covered up, or distanced itself, or craftily converted itself to a cat without a meow, when Guyanese taxpayers’ interests competed with those of PPP Government hustlers. A heavy segment of the Public Procurement Commission is of a compellingly distorted nature. Too curly. Too twisty.
The final piece of President Ali’s grand delivery was “At the same time a new bid protest committee has also been appointed as an additional layer of protection to safeguard integrity of public procurement system”. Again and again, it comes to the character of the people handpicked to ensure darkness reigns. If that “new bid protest committee” consists of PPP hacks and other quacks, then those protesting had better not hold their breath and hope for fairness and justice. I have said this before, and it is invaluable in saying again: check most of the people that the president and vice president surround themselves with, and there is Guyana’s corruption demographic to an astounding degree. How it is that both national leaders only settle for a mainly corrupt cast is beyond my pay grade. So many in such congested high-level quarters. The more the president speaks on certain issues, the more he mocks himself.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
