Jamaica attorney general stresses procurement lessons

0

Derrick McKoy tells international audience that procurement has been on a long journey in Jamaica, and that some perceived solutions can make things worse.

Derrick McKoy, the Attorney General of Jamaica, has set out the challenges faced over the years with procurement, and the improvements that have come about more recently.  

Talking to an international audience of legal experts, he explained how standard contracts proved useful. “The general assumption was that public works procurements required good contract management and you can’t manage a contract well if you don’t know the contract. Having a contract you are familiar with is not by any means a bad thing and if you adopt a new contract with terms you are not sure about you can end up in dispute quickly.”

However, he warned that this may have led to past complacency. “So standard contracts have been useful. The context was then ‘how well can we manage this contract’ and we could clearly follow the rules and requirements of the familiar book.”

“As I said earlier, the advantage of that was that we were all working with rules we thought we knew and so did everyone else. But in this jurisdiction, public sector works procurements was dominated by time and cost problems. So we assumed there must be something with the contractor and thus we were procuring wrong. We asked ourselves ‘how do we get a contractor who can deliver better’.

This led to some big mistakes and McKoy set out one in particular.

“Jamaica created a body of people who were procurement experts – experts not in the discipline but in the rules. All departments had to go through them and you would not believe how badly this thing worked. It was cumbersome, and worse, it created a general sense of paralysis through the people further down the departments who feared making the wrong decision and so preferred to make no decision.”

He stressed that the assumption that led to that mistake was a bad one. “We had an arrogance that no one could do this as well as we could and that if we could not find engineering capacity, the issue could not be our lack of skills as a body. But in fact, as a small economy, we don’t have all those skills in large numbers and we can lose people quickly. So the assumption that we could find the resources was false.”

The approach has since changed across government departments, he told the international audience.

“My sense is that there is now great accommodation for this reality. There is acceptance that we should let someone else take on these roles. There’s a greater accommodation and willingness to think about this type of development for larger types of works.”

Derrick Mckoy was speaking at the FIDIC Contract Users Conference in the Americas on 17 May 2022.