Monitoring Public Works
IT IS an open secret how a lot of public works
in the country are bedeviled by lack of efficiency, negligence, corrupt practices and
proper oversight from the concerned officials. It does not take a road engineer to smell
rat when, for instance, a road just asphalted begins to wear and tear in a matter of
months or even days. This has gone on for as long as one remembers. The quality of public
works is extremely poor, resulting in unavoidable maintenance costs. The way public works
are contracted to contractors and the way it is supervised leaves a lot to be desired. The
public has always wondered how the contractors get their payment even when the works they
were assigned to do have not been fully completed or when the works said to be completed
are visibly sub-standard. Obviously, in collusion with the concerned officials, the
contractors are doing what they have always been doing i.e. quickly complete the task
without any regard to quality, with the comfort in the knowledge that their agreed
payments would not be blocked by the officials who are under their payroll through the
under-the-table deals.
It looks like things may change on this front if
the new directive issued by the Ministry of Works and Physical Planning to organizations
under it, like the Roads Department, are implemented fully. According to a press release
from the Ministry, the agencies working under it have been asked to provide public
services in a quick and efficient manner and to maintain transparency in all their
activities. In an apparent bid for transparency, these bodies have been asked to determine
time period for these services, inform the monitoring unit at the ministry about this and
then display all related information at the offices where it is visible to everybody.
Similarly, in a bid to check irregularities, the ministry has instructed that no
construction or purchasing work should be carried out without approving the cost estimate,
nor should purchases or construction be done without quotations, except in cases of
emergency. This as well as another instruction that calls for pre-qualification and
post-qualification be carried out through a proper healthy competition, are clearly
designed to check irregularities that are common in many of the agencies under this
ministry and where large-scale funds are involved. If these directives become a norm in
the agencies under this ministry and monitoring is done strictly, the public could hope to
see less leakage of the public funds, be it through poor performance or outright corrupt
practices.
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