Peter Espeut | Be patient! And have a short memory!

“So we just appeal to the people of St Thomas: be patient with us. We are working with you, and we are trying our best to complete this stuff. … Joy cometh in the morning. So just hold on. You will have joy very shortly. … Very soon you will have a very good road infrastructure, and I’m sure by that time you will forget the inconvenience,” Minister without Portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister Everald Warmington, as recorded on November 4, 2022, and is posted on the YouTube channel of The Gleaner .

This has been the Government’s mantra for some time: ‘Be patient! You will only have to put up with inconvenience for a short time. Soon your trials will be over, and you will get your new road/highway/bridge (whatever), and you will soon forget the inconvenience’ (and vote for us at the next election).

I’m not sure it works like that! People have long memories. Especially of hurtful episodes.

I live a mile or two into one such never-ending construction venture: the South Coast Highway Improvement Project (SCHIP), upgrading the roadway between Harbour View and Port Antonio. I went to one of the public relations meetings the government staged to sell the idea; no promise was left unspoken. Ground was broken in November 2019; the project was projected to cost US$384 million and was scheduled to end in 36 months; the defects liability period would extend for an additional two years.

Pretty quickly two concrete pipe sections were dropped in a gully at Seven Miles, Bull Bay; they remained untouched for over two years. We could see that we were in for the long haul.

OVERRUNS

By 2021, it was clear that SCHIP would incur cost and time overruns. Addressing Parliament on July 26, 2021, Minister Warmington announced that the engineering consultancy and project management services would cost an additional US$8.7 million; construction costs would increase by US$60.83 million; and their original planning did not foresee that expansion and renewal of National Water Commission (NWC) systems, including sewerage, would be needed; this would add a whopping US$64.36 million to the overall cost. Total cost overruns identified in 2021 on this one project were US$133.9 million (or about J$20 billion). I wonder to where the projected overruns on SCHIP have now escalated in 2023?

The Government sought to delay the tabling in Parliament of a special report by the Auditor General (AuG) on the National Works Agency (NWA). If the report was favourable to the Government, you can bet it would have been tabled with Gun Court speed! One could easily predict that the report would be somewhat embarrassing. The AuG’s report tabled in Gordon House last Tuesday indicated that the NWA incurred cost overruns totalling US$63.4 million (J$9.8 billion) for rehabilitation work on five of six main roads under the Major Infrastructure Development Programme (MIDP).

These roads included work on the Mandela Highway, Constant Spring Road, Hagley Park Road, and Ferris Cross to Mackfield Road programmes, all completed years ago. These cost overruns of J$10 billion on five roads are dwarfed by the J$20 billion cost overruns on SCHIP alone as of 2021. Two more years of cost overruns have accrued. I doubt the Government will wish the AuG’s report on that project to be tabled!

The reasons for the MIDP cost overruns advanced by the AuG are that the original scope of works written up by the NWA did not properly take into account the impact of repairs needed on the National Water Commission underground water and sewer lines. After construction had commenced, the contracted entity, China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC), subsequently discovered leaking pipelines that would negatively impact the rehabilitated road infrastructure. In response, the NWA told the AuG it did not know the conditions of the pipes before the start of work. The NWA says the scope of work was later expanded by the Government to address these concerns, to avoid the risk of having to dig up the road to rehabilitate these pipelines, thus causing the cost overruns.

CONTRACTED ENTITY

CHEC is also the contracted entity for SCHIP, supervised by the NWA. Did not the NWA and CHEC learn anything from their experience with MIDP? Could they not have foreseen that the same situation would recur? Artificial intelligence would have seen it immediately!

I am sure that no heads will roll. After all, it is only $20 billion of the people’s money!

We are now almost at the end of July, and they say that SCHIP should be complete by the end of August. Hardly likely! Over the years, we have put up with a serious dust nuisance, pitted road surfaces, flooding, and severe inconvenience and delays in getting from place to place. My wife and I have not been able to access our favourite tavern and eatery in Bull Bay for some time; I can imagine how the myriad small businesses along the route are losing money, and moving further away from prosperity.

And the government expects us to love the new road so much that we will forget the inconvenience and the financial losses? Hardly likely! Our patience has worn thin, and we have memories like the proverbial elephant.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and development scientist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.