While it may be good politics and great for newspaper sales, the war between the Government and "some elements" of the indigenous construction sector is completely counter-productive, a distraction from some important issues and unlikely to engender confidence by local private sector in making new investments in the productive sector. Speaking in San Juan on Monday after a walkabout in the constituency, Mr Manning said: "See what is happening in the newspapers and you realise it is a plan to kill Manning–when I say 'kill' I'm not talking about...you know how they like to misunderstand–but we are not prepared to accept the established order, and we are going to fight until we change it. The people deserve value for money.
"Those who wish to do right have to face the slings and arrows of those who do wrong, and if you want to achieve anything as someone striving for rectitude, you have to have endurance and determination, and must not allow yourself to be scared. "They're coming at me from every angle, but I fear no man." Quite predictably, in the face of such an onslaught, the Joint Consultative Council for the construction industry launched a stinging counterattack at a previously scheduled news conference on Tuesday. Its president, Winston Riley, said the fight was about the strengthening of institutions in this country "and if we are going to be pursued by people who are misreading our objectives, then so be it...We are prepared to fight to the death." As usual in arguments like this, there are good and bad points on both sides of the argument.
The Prime Minister is quite right when he said that the people deserve value for money. The population would be prepared to support him if he had limited his remarks to saying that the Government would fight to ensure that ALL state-funded projects finish on time, within budget and with great attention to detail.
The truth is that there are good local contractors and there are bad local contractors just as there are good and bad foreign contractors. There are local contractors who in the recent construction boom completed projects on time, close to the original budget and with great attention to detail and there are foreign contractors who have exceeded their budget, delivered their projects late and produced work that is sub-standard.
The E-teck flagship building in Tamana, which is being built by a Chinese contractor, was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2008 but the project is still struggling along with little attention being paid to whether the citizens of T&T are receiving value for money.
The Chinese contractor on the Prime Minister's Residence and Diplomatic Centre may have completed significant aspects of that project within eight months. But, in September last year, the Education Facilities Company Ltd had cause to terminate a Chinese contractor it had hired to build the Princes Town East Secondary School. The company also fired the contractor on the Siparia East Secondary School. That same state-owned special purpose company has also had problems with a Korean contractor of early childhood care and education centres. So, it would be a gross simplification, if not an outright falsehood, for anyone to argue that, as far as the local construction sector goes, foreign equals good and local equals bad. The problems faced by T&T's construction sector in the period 2005 to 2009 are, more than anything, the result of the Government trying to construct too many buildings at the same time.
During the construction boom, this issue of sequencing led to sharp increases in the price of all construction materials and serious shortages of skilled and unskilled labour. These are two of the main reasons why local contractors may have had difficulties delivering projects on time and within budget. (Some of the foreign contractors who were allowed to bring labour from their home countries did not have this problem.) As was stated at the JCC news conference on Tuesday, many of the state-owned special purpose companies are as bad as, if not worse than, the public service they were established to replace, when it comes to making payments on time to local contractors for completed work. The issue, then, is less about the wickedness of "some elements" of the local construction sector than it is about the misjudgment that the Government made about the capacity of the country to deliver so many projects in a short space of time. This should not be construed as being a defence of the local contractors as there are some bad ones as well as there are some good companies that have done bad projects.
But it needs to be said that the local construction sector, good or bad, is vitally important to the development of the country.
As the Prime Minister has said on a number of occasions, it is important for local contractors to have foreign competition so that they do not get lazy or indulge in cartel-like behaviour.
But it is inappropriate, for many reasons, for this country to build its infrastructure by awarding about 75 per cent of the value of contracts in the period 2004 to 2008 to foreign contractors. Before embarking on its construction drive, the Government should have spent some time seeking to improve the capacity of local contractors to deliver projects on time, on budget and with great attention to detail. That way, more of the construction jobs would have gone to local contractors and the Government would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars in the foreign exchange used to pay the foreign contractors, in some cases, or the large foreign currency debts, in others.
And, it must be asked, if the Prime Minister has declared war on his enemies in the local construction sector, is he going to be consumed in waging that battle? Will his attention be diverted away from the real "enemies" the country faces–such as crime, the need to get the local private sector to resume investing in the local economy, the CL Financial/Clico debacle and the need to embark on a programme of divestment? Given the fact that the economy remains in a recession, does it help in any way that our Prime Minister is fighting the wrong battle when he should be focused on fighting the right ones?
Editor's Note:
Last week in this space, I made reference to a trip that Dr Lenny Saith, former Udecott executive chairman Calder Hart and Prof Kenneth Julien made to Malaysia. That trip, Dr Saith informed me, took place in November 2006. This was after the contract for the construction of the Legal Affairs Tower was signed by the Government of T&T and Sunway and not before as I had stated.
Dr Saith also said that Prof Kenneth Julien did not meet with Sunway officials. Dr Saith and Hart did meet with Sunway officials on that trip but Dr Saith says he also had meetings with other construction companies, the umbrella body representing the Malaysian construction industry, Petronas, Malaysia's state energy company and with state institutions in the IT sector.