Edghill urges residents to report substandard works within communities

In order to ensure that contractors upkeep their end of the bargain to produce superlative projects, Public Works Minister Juan Edghill has called on Guyanese to report instances of substandard works within their communities.

Recently, rehabilitative road works valued at $26 million were commissioned in Corentyne, Region Six (East Berbice-Corentyne).
There, the Public Works Minister urged citizens to pay attention to various projects within their communities, and report instances of substandard works.
“If you are seeing substandard work, if you’re seeing work that is not of the proper quality as citizens, you have a right to speak out…Across the country, whether it’s a school, an administrative building, a health centre, a hospital, a road, a highway, a bridge; I want to ask Guyanese to pay attention to the developmental works that are taking place in your communities.”
This is among a series of measures so that the country gets its value for money. In fact, the Minister pointed out that one of the key issues spanning years has been overpayment to contractors – a situation Government is trying to remedy.

“A lot of what the Auditor General has been talking about is overpayments; contractors getting paid for works that are not done. When you do the actual measurement, they get more money than work done. That was then. We’re in a new era and we want a collaborative effort at the community level to ensure we get value for money,” Edghill noted.
He added that on the Ministry’s end, scrutiny will be placed on engineers responsible for the monitoring and execution of these projects.
“We need conscientious engineers on my team who manage these projects. We don’t need engineers who hassling contractors and trying to get a raise from a contractor. We don’t need engineers who are working and dealing with the contractor to siphon off money and sharing it. We need the savings. We need to ensure that we get the correct measurements so we want conscientious engineers.”
The Minister shared that citizens being the “eyes and ears” of the communities should not result in any hostile behaviour or confrontation when addressing issues of shoddy works.
Just last week at a similar event in the region, he had noted that Government is committed to ensuring that road improvement needs in all communities are addressed.
Edghill told residents of Angoy’s Avenue, New Amsterdam, “If we have not gotten to you as yet, yours will be the next or the next after the next… one thing you know is that the PPP has a track record of keeping its promises and I am saying to you that we will be upgrading all of the roads in Angoy’s Avenue within the next four years… “People have to bear up with us, if you come and picket us all the time is not the way to get it done… so not everybody who run to my office and start misbehaving will get a response for the next day. It can’t happen. Some people have to wait a little bit and have a bit of patience but we will try to help as much persons as possible.”