— Minister Indar urges them to bid for gov’t projects
— not to be discouraged, intimidated by ‘big’ contractors

WITH the recent boom in the local construction sector, Minister within the Ministry of Public Works, Deodat Indar, is encouraging small contractors to take up the many opportunities that have now become available.

The minister made this remark during a recent edition of the Guyana Dialogue, where he noted that while the big contractors have access to more resources and have been bidding on both large and small contracts, government is committed to ensuring that the small contractors also benefit from projects.

“We have told publicly other people, to get into the business so that they can come and pick up some of the smaller contracts, because, if you drill down on the problem, what you have is some large contractors sometimes bid for the small jobs and they choke out the small men. So, what we’re trying to do now is bring in small people into the system, so that they can develop capacity,” Minister Indar said.

One of the points of concerns regarding the big contractors that was noted by the minister, is their inability to meet deadlines due to their resources being spread too thin across too many projects.

Minister Indar stated that many of these contractors have been known to be simultaneously bidding for projects to build roads, bridges and schools in both the coastland and hinterland regions, making it difficult for them to have resources and machinery at the various project sites.

He related that after coming into government, his ministry was forced to issue ultimatums to several contractors who were not honouring their contractual obligations.

He said that on many occasions after receiving complaints from citizens on delayed infrastructural works, the ministry has had to take stringent action including informing the national tender board about the contractors’ poor performance.

“They [the citizens] will tag you in posts and all kinds of things [and] you’ll see what’s going on. It’s unfair to the citizenry to have something that’s supposed to be done in three months taking six months. At that point, obviously, the engineer would have had multiple conversations with a contractor. But sometimes contractors have different excuses for different things. Sometimes it’s the weather and then you’re not getting enough crusher-run stone. There’s always some issue, but sometimes it is just poor management,” Minister Indar said.

In June 2021, President, Dr Irfaan Ali had instructed Attorney-General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Anil Nandlall, to “Immediately review all service and maintenance contracts within the sphere of the Government of Guyana, and the entire state structure, in relation to drainage pumps, sluices, kokers and drainage and irrigation, generally,”

President Ali had ordered that the Attorney-General “enforce any penalty clause against contractors who are in breach of their obligations under these [servicing and maintenance] contracts”.

In instances where the penalty clauses are absent from the contracts, Minister Nandlall was asked to ensure that such contracts are renegotiated for the purpose of inserting penalty clauses, which can be activated when contractors fail to discharge their duties.

Even as he encouraged small contractors to bid, Minister Indar reminded all contractors, big and small, not to spread themselves too thin as this could lead to ineffective execution.

“If a person has a huge job over in the Housing Ministry, and they win maybe two, three other big jobs in our ministry, and local government, clearly you will have to assess the contractor’s ability to execute multiple jobs,” the minister said.

As part of the major changes within the ministry to increase the efficient undertaking of projects, Minister Indar disclosed that a large percentage of the recent projects were awarded to small contractors, many of whom have never worked with the ministry before.