I’m a bad road contractor
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I am one of the road contractors, about whom you complain, and receive your insults and curses every morning and evening, and who have caused losses to many of you, delaying your work, damaging your vehicles, and even causing the death of your family and relatives… We are the road contractors.
I am not speaking for myself here, but for all the contractors I know in my field. We all admit that we have some role in the issue of poor state roads. All of us, without exception, knew what we were doing badly, and we knew in advance that the asphalt of this road or that street would not last, and that it would need maintenance in a short period. And we all knew that maintenance would not be achieved, and if it was achieved, it would not be useful, as the ruin is greater than maintenance, and therefore we admit our failure.
However, what about the bidding system that encourages corruption? What about the ruin in the ministry’s procedures and systems? What about the constant pressure from senior and corrupt officials on us to ask for bribes?
In any “corrupt” process, whether it is goods, services, or a bad road, there are always two parties, and this does not mean at all that all contractors and all ministries’ officials are corrupt or encourage corruption.
But when there is a corrupt supplier or contractor there is, opposite him, a corrupt civil servant, a corrupt supervisor, a corrupt controller, and a corrupt engineer.
What about the government agencies that insist on rejecting our reasonable requests not to use any road before 12 to 18 hours have passed after paving process so that its components hold together, and order the road to be opened after hours only, to avoid obstructing traffic? What about the government company that supplies asphalt plants with non-compliant products?
What about the refusal of the Ministry of Public Works to use international consulting offices to study the state of roads and consider the cause of the erosion of our roads?
And what about job congestion, laxity, and laziness in the oversight bodies over the quality of roads and the quality of materials used in the paving process, from the authority, ministry, and laboratories, and the conflict among them?
What about the marginalization of the Roads Authority and the withdrawal of its employees and powers?
And what about the ministry’s failure to hold the negligent contractors accountable, especially with regard to maintenance guarantees, as we were all accused of corruption?
What about the failure of the Ministry of Finance to allocate sufficient funds for road repair and maintenance?
Why the silence on the repeated formation of committees to solve the road problem, and the rejection of their recommendations time after time?
And why has the Roads Authority never been interested in checking the weights of trucks that use the roads, and exceeding the legal load?
Finally, what about the Kuwaiti supervisor, whether an office or an individual, who knows very well that what they supervise or handed over work does not conform to the specifications”, so some of them pass it on, and go to pray?
The issue is not an issue of a ruined road, but rather an issue of a wounded homeland, and a clear moral decline. Before we think about how to solve the road problem today, which will be destroyed months later, we must also think about reforming the corruption of the government administration, and stop appointing those we “love” among the children, relatives, and voters to top positions that they do not deserve the honor of assuming.
e-mail: [email protected]
By Ahmad alsarraf
This news has been read 31886 times!
