Procurement’s concrete barriers

So, there I was, preparing to engage in big people business this week with a commentary on the procurement law fiasco. Then came one of the more eminently sensible public voices, in the form of Helen Drayton … right here on this very page last Sunday. You can skip me and find her column.

What more can I add, I thought. Ms Drayton argued in favour of sound, rational law-making in order “to foster good governance, accountability, transparency, integrity, value for money, efficiency, fairness, equity, and public confidence.”

That her perspectives are now being only marginally noted signals a sad absence from the independent benches of our parliament, with all due respect to the incumbents. Yet, thankfully, this voice of reason prevails through the devices of a free press. Ditto the more strident efforts of Afra Raymond, aligned to the necessity for greater transparency.

But before I get to some of the more substantial offerings of these two citizens, Ms Drayton in particular, I offer a perspective to consider. If, as I argued three years ago, legislation to govern state procurement is not accompanied by an uncompromising commitment – through legislation, convention, or regulated practice – to a higher level of transparency it would amount to nothing more than inconvenient, fanciful adornments.

Additionally, throughout the various debates and public discussions when the subject became fashionable, I was reminded of a classroom many years ago with Dr Daphne Phillips-Gaskin at the front explaining the true meaning of authoritarian societies, including the adoption of such mindsets and practices by hapless subjects.

This makes it is easy to understand why when traffic needs to be diverted, a concrete culvert instead of a more forgiving obstruction is routinely considered. The words of a late colleague who had just lost a daughter on one of our highways linger: “Concrete? It had to be concrete? Not a cable, a plastic barrier. Concrete?”

Why, after all, use plastic or cable when a single slab of concrete would do?

I kept counting occasions such as these when enlightened, weighted, nuanced solutions were being thrown in the fire in exchange for legislative concrete and steel with sharp edges.

So, a public threat is observed. Spurn precision and professional judgment for a state of public emergency with all attendant risks associated with suspending a wide swathe of human rights. So even as I ranted over its unlawful application back in 2011, there was in the background to this outrage, broad public advocacy for steel-reinforced concrete.

More recently, people wanted pepper spray. Take pepper spray. Enter a regime of requirements befitting far more harmful instruments of violence. How many pepper spray permits have been granted since then?

Three years ago, I saw it coming. Politicians in and out of parliament, civil society organisations (including well-resourced business chambers), social commentators – all desiring the application of a sledge-hammer – however desirable the expected outcome.

Ms Drayton kindly ridicules a notion of “teething problems” and notes “a failure to understand the full implications of meaningful procurement law and a lack of preparedness.” Indeed, fully in keeping with the “culture” to which I constantly allude, the former senator notes “suspicious public ‘jammin’ to proclaim the law.”

I recognised nothing “suspicious” though. Only an authoritarian culture working its way through the complexities of democracy. Early on, I turned to an influential business executive and asked whether the business community understand what it was asking for. This was not meant to be an insult, but simply to sound an alert at the approaching menace of a sightless, legislative sledgehammer.

Now, as usual, we have to set about repairing some damage and Ms Drayton’s prescriptions sound absolutely fitting.

They are repeated here because they will unfold as critical areas for consideration in the coming days. There has to be a temporary stay on the requirements of the Public Depository. Private sector players ought to have sounded much earlier, urgent alerts on this, but there we go.

The other point made by Ms Drayton relates heavily to my constant harping on the imperatives of real, non-cosmetic e-governance. Why should it be that there is a concern about the “ease of navigation” of the Depository website? Where are the experts on such matters?

Then there is, and more closely aligned to my own inexpert observation, the need to impose a sensible "spending threshold for public service accounting officer and the CEOs of other public entities within the law.” Why is it necessary to say this at this stage?

Finally, Ms Drayton proposes a six-month period “to improve the system” especially since there are close to 33,000 “lines of business pending prequalification.” She is a woman of boundless faith.

 

 

SOS of the Luddites

I can see it now. The massing of the public service technophobes. They told us so, didn’t they? It took a cyberattack to remind us, hasn’t it?

Witness the Luddite recoil. The resort to the “good old days” when paper and files grew yellow in the cupboards. All it took were locks and keys and cautionary memos.

And by the way, colleagues, “ransomware” refers to a very specific category of cyberattack. I thought Mark Lyndersay and Celia Gibbings made some of these things clear, courtesy the TTPBA recently.

Anyway, stand by for the resurrection of systems that empowered and enriched some by slowing the march to modernity.

Even so, I am still not failing to remind people that at approximately 2.20 p.m. on Thursday September 23, 2021 – in his capacity as minister in the Office of the Prime Minister - Stuart Young announced the arrival of “digital vaccination cards” in “four to six weeks.”

This is not at all to knock Minister Young personally. I am pretty certain he understands the immense value of digital governance and is a private practitioner when it comes to those automated things in life that make things easier and more convenient.

In fact, he probably moans and groans each time some of us go back to those fateful days of pandemic misery and the false hope that, at last, politicians and bureaucrats had joined together to acknowledge new realities and were prepared to embrace a different set of solutions.

Of course, all of this goes way beyond digital vaccination cards and their inexcusable non-appearance. But it was a useful test case with strong relevance to the fact that both strenuously active and quiet, disruptive resistance to change are perpetual features of our exceedingly slow march to innovation.

As I have said before, this is not unique to the public service and state authorities. Shiny, new digital facades to conceal manual processes are evident throughout the private sector in key areas.

However, the resources of the state are, by definition, assets of the population intended to sustain human and social development and to ensure tolerable levels of existence in our spaces.

Yet, the official instinct to prohibit rather than to facilitate appears to dominate the drive to digitalise and to move forward. In some instances, the move has been backward rather than forward.

I noted, for instance, PM Roosevelt Skerritt’s lament regarding the continued use of paper ED (Embarkation and Disembarkation) Cards for intra-regional air and sea travel between Caricom states. This was during 50th anniversary celebrations. He quite diplomatically did not mention T&T, where he delivered his speech, and where the absolutely unnecessary practice of collecting and collating ED cards continues. The folks at CARICOM-IMPACS must be the most patient people on the planet.

But we don’t only insist on printing those silly pieces of paper that do not even have enough space to spell the name of our own country (I usually write “T&T”). That’s clearly not enough. Now, the airlines want you to write, at the back of the slips, the expiry date of your passport!

This adds insult to the emotional injury of passengers who know that for entering numerous countries of the world (including Dominica, Grenada, Barbados, Saint Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, and Jamaica), the trees used to print those useless pieces of paper (in defiance of the benefits of the Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) and other technological platforms) are being saved.

Where are the airport kiosks on arrival in T&T, by the way? Could it be evidence of the agony occasioned by the relinquishing of authority and power? How come online payment for government services is being touted as some kind of modern, revolutionary marvel? Ditto downloadable PDF forms.

It cannot be that politicians and senior public servants do not know what is happening in so much of the rest of the world.

Now comes the cyber attack on the Attorney General’s office. I see several MPs (government and opposition) attended “a workshop” last week and some consequently claim to know all about the challenge being faced. Sigh.

Moving backward has a way of gaining momentum of its own. I see longer ED forms. Disappearing bar and QR codes. The return of the ledgers. Lines at the cashiers. Paper, paper everywhere.

Our souls would have been saved; I suppose. The Luddite SOS satisfied. The past embraced as a way of inching forward or, worse, standing still.