Shape up or ship out, PS warns rural road builders

Road contractors in the rural areas have up to three months to deliver or face contract suspension and cancellation.

Infrastructure principal secretary John Mosonik gave the ultimatum last  Friday after a meeting with contractors, government engineers and the Ministry of Transport officials to assess the challenges facing rural road projects.

“It is disturbing to note that almost 70 per cent of the projects have performed poorly. Over half of them have moved between zero and 20 per cent while about 59 per cent have surpassed their contractual periods,” Mr Mosonik said.

“We cannot continue this way and if you cannot perform in the next three months, I don’t want to see you in any of our database. Why should you even be paid when you are doing nothing at all?”

The PS said while some contractors had received full payments, the  progress of their work is very slow. This, he added, has raised concerns from the public and development partners.

The contractors, who pleaded for more time were hard-pressed to  explain what is holding them back with some blaming resident engineers.

“Resident engineers are the ones to blame for some of these delays. Your engineers must wake up and be available if we have to beat these timelines,” Mr Nyoro of Nyoro Construction Company said.

SLOW IMPLEMENTATION

There was a heated debate between contractors and ministry officials before the PS arrived to officiate the forum.

Contractors also blamed delayed payments for the slow progress in construction. However Roads ministry officials insisted that some contractors were not keen on the set timelines.

Some contractors were, however, accused of acting as middlemen between the government and other contractors. It was said that they sub-contract their projects because they do not have the capacity to implement them.

“I can give an example of 70-kilometre road project where we had to convince the contractor to assign the work to another contractor well after delaying with only 20 kilometres done.

The assignee completed another 20kms while the contractor was still stuck at the same spot. Let us be practical please,” said Transport ministry’s chief engineer Patrick Mwinzi.

Contracts given under the Kenya Rural Roads Authority were said to be the slowest in implementation compared to those of other authorities such as Kenya Urban Roads Authority and Kenya National Highway Authority.

Many contractors pointed an accusing finger at delayed compensation, which they said had taken over four years to process.

They also faulted a proposal to pay them based on performance saying the plan would benefit foreign contractors who have better funding sources and could complete projects in record time. It also emerged that the few projects, which were on schedule, were mainly those handled by new contractors in the industry.

Mr Mosonik had held a similar meeting with contractors in January where he named projects that were progressing at a snail’s pace and issued a stern warning against slow progress.