As in­di­cat­ed by High Court Judge Ricky Rahim, a for­mer board of the Sports Com­pa­ny of T&T (SporTT) failed to per­form its re­spon­si­bil­i­ty re­lat­ing to the award of a $34 mil­lion con­tract to eBeam In­ter­act Ltd.

The judge al­so said that based on the mul­ti­tude of er­rors made in eBeam In­ter­act’s pro­pos­al, the board should have been con­cerned about the ca­pac­i­ty of the com­pa­ny to de­liv­er to the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress-led Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment dur­ing its term from 2010-2015. 

Ac­cord­ing to Jus­tice Rahim, scep­ti­cism and in­ves­ti­ga­tion should have been the ap­proach of the board, in­stead of sim­ply fol­low­ing the di­rec­tive re­ceived from the Min­istry of Sport to award the con­tract; more so on the ba­sis of a sole ten­der rather than com­pet­i­tive bid­ding.

Un­der terms of the con­tract, eBeam In­ter­act had to sup­ply ed­u­ca­tion­al and tech­no­log­i­cal mod­ules for the now-de­funct Life­S­port pro­gramme, a brain­child of then min­is­ter of sport Anil Roberts. In the blow-out which fol­lowed, the ser­vices to Life­S­port were not pro­vid­ed amidst con­tention of al­leged fail­ures of the min­istry to meet stip­u­la­tions in the con­tract with­in a spec­i­fied pe­ri­od.

Ul­ti­mate­ly, when the project was not achieved, with al­le­ga­tions of mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion of mil­lions of tax­pay­ers’ dol­lars al­so in the pub­lic do­main, min­is­ter Roberts re­signed, al­leged­ly pushed to do so by then prime min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar.

“The ex­pec­ta­tion of the pub­lic that some­thing will be done when wrongs are com­mit­ted in pub­lic of­fice is now a hall­mark of good gov­er­nance,” PM Per­sad-Bisses­sar said then in ac­cept­ing Roberts’ res­ig­na­tion.

In ad­di­tion to the heavy fi­nan­cial loss of gov­ern­ment funds re­sult­ing from the de­ba­cle, the judge not­ed the fail­ure of the pro­gramme to rad­i­cal­ly change the lives of youth.  

How many of such youth have lost their way sub­se­quent to the col­lapse of the Life­S­port pro­gramme? It’s a ques­tion so­ci­ety should pon­der to­day.

Jus­tice Rahim’s rul­ing, far from clos­ing that chap­ter on the Min­istry of Sport and the Life­S­port pro­gramme, opens up new ar­eas for ques­tion­ing and in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to the judg­ment, it was the min­istry which in­struct­ed the board to award the con­tract to eBeam In­ter­act. Who in the min­istry gave the in­struc­tions and why? And why did the board blind­ly fol­low them?

Was min­is­ter Roberts aware of the slop­py pro­pos­al pre­sent­ed by eBeam In­ter­act? If so, did he then par­tic­i­pate ac­tive­ly or pas­sive­ly in the in­struc­tion to the board to make the award of the con­tract? Why were the el­e­ments of the con­tract not ful­filled, which al­lowed the con­trac­tor to claim pay­ment based on al­leged short­com­ings of the min­istry to meet its end of the arrange­ment? 

Giv­en the ac­tion tak­en by Per­sad-Bisses­sar to de­mand Roberts’ res­ig­na­tion then, has she now come to a dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion about his abil­i­ty, suf­fi­cient to once again give him a min­is­te­r­i­al po­si­tion in her Gov­ern­ment of 2025?

For a state board to func­tion with­out re­la­tion to qual­i­ty de­ci­sion-mak­ing and to un­ques­tion­ing­ly fol­low the di­rec­tions of a min­istry, opens the door­way to mis­man­age­ment and cor­rup­tion by pub­lic of­fi­cials. Are boards mere­ly “yes men” of the gov­ern­ment that ap­points them, then? If so, the coun­try can­not ex­pect that state-ap­point­ed boards will ever func­tion in the best in­ter­est of the coun­try.