Contractors warned about Govt’s intolerance over delayed projects

The slow movement of the Hope Secondary School project is worrying to Education Minister Priya Manickchand, who has visited the site to assess the school’s readiness.

The project was originally the brainchild of the PPP/C Government, however, when the APNU/AFC Coalition took office, they undertook the project, yet it has not been completed to date.
“This school should have been finished in January of 2020. We are now in August 2020, and I’m told by the technical experts on the ground and the consultants that at this pace…with these workers, the school is not going to be finished until May next year. That is wholly unacceptable,” Minister Manickchand is quoted as saying by the Department of Public Information during a site visit on Thursday.
The Education Minister also stated that during the timeline of the project, a number of secondary students have missed a beneficial opportunity.
“I left this project in 2015, and I’m here in 2020 and we’re not finished. You have children that started high school, who are going to leave high school, (who) did not get to benefit from this project… It’s designed to take off 800 students from Plaisance to this area. And not only 800 students, but to take off the top students in this area; it’s a Grade-A school,” she explained.
She also issued a warning to contractors, stating that such behaviour will not be tolerated under the PPP/C Government.
“People who bid for contracts and win them must ensure they do what they have to do to realise the terms they signed in the contract… I want to sound a warning to contractors: The Ministry of Education, and indeed the Government of Guyana, is not going to be tolerant of projects that go way beyond the time. Most contracts have provisions for liquidated damages, and those are going to start being applied,” Manickchand said in the DPI report.
Further, she said that blame for non-completion could not be laid on the COVID-19 pandemic, as the school was to be completed before the country went into lockdown.
Manickchand remains committed to seeing completion of the school’s construction. She said she is excited to see the vision of the PPP/C benefit hundreds of students as well as the community as a whole.
The Good Hope Secondary School is a multi-million-dollar project funded by the World Bank. “It’s part of a wider loan…meant to improve our Mathematics, so there’s a softer side that deals with the Mathematics, and there’s the hard side, as we would say, that deals with the construction or making access classrooms and spaces for our students,” Project Coordinator of the Secondary Education Improvement Project, Jimmy Bhojedat, explained. Bhojedat further noted that a number of other areas are being focused on, including English, Sciences and Technical Education.
The Hope Secondary School is expected to have twenty-six classrooms, a library block, a block for home economics, clothing and textiles, food and nutrition, art, science and IT labs, as well as a block for Technical and Vocational Training.