Attorney General Anil Nandlall’s recent announcement that the Government of Guyana intends to review the Public Procurement Act and standard form contracts is a welcomed, if overdue, admission that something is deeply wrong with how public contracts are being managed in this country. But while the Attorney General focused his remarks on the conduct of engineers and supervisors after contracts are awarded, there is a far more troubling question that demands answers before any contract is ever signed.
Why are contractors in Guyana regularly bidding at prices that are double the engineer’s estimate, and why are those bids being accepted?
This is not a rare anomaly. It is a pattern. Across public sector projects in Guyana, bids have come in at or near one hundred percent above what the state’s own engineers determined the work should cost. In a properly functioning procurement system, a bid that dramatically exceeds the engineer’s estimate triggers immediate scrutiny. It raises a red flag. It invites questions. In Guyana, it apparently triggers a contract signing.
This raises one of two uncomfortable conclusions, and neither speaks well of the current system.
The first possibility is incompetence. If engineers are consistently producing estimates that bear no relationship to actual market costs, then the state is paying for a professional service it is not receiving. Engineers are engaged at significant public expense to provide accurate, independent cost assessments. If those assessments are routinely off by one hundred percent, one must ask whether the individuals producing them are qualified for the task, and whether the government is doing anything to hold them accountable for the quality of their work.
The second possibility is far more serious. If the engineers are competent and their estimates are accurate, then bids that double those figures are not the result of market conditions or cost pressures. They are the result of contractors pricing in a margin that should never exist, and a system that allows those prices to be accepted without consequence. That is not procurement failure. That is fraud.
Nandlall himself acknowledged that engineers and supervisors are financially incentivized to support contractor variations, with their own remuneration tied to contract extensions and price increases. If this conflict of interest exists after contract award, one must ask whether it also exists before. Are engineers lowballing estimates to create room for inflated bids they already know are coming? Are procurement evaluators aware of the gap and approving contracts regardless? These are not conspiratorial questions. They are the logical extension of the pattern this government has now publicly acknowledged.
This is precisely why Guyana must move urgently to establish a formal licensing regime for engineers practicing in the public sector. In jurisdictions where such systems exist, a professional license is not merely a credential. It is a bond of accountability between the engineer, the state and the public. An engineer who produces fraudulent estimates, who supports unjustified variations, or who is found to have colluded with contractors does not simply lose a government contract. That engineer loses the ability to practice entirely. License revocation, suspension, and mandatory professional sanctions must become central tools in the government’s response to procurement abuse. No engineer should be permitted to oversee public funds without the threat of losing their professional standing if they betray the public trust. Competence must be certified, conduct must be monitored, and consequences must be real.
The review announced by the Attorney General must go beyond tightening contract language. It must examine who is approving these bids, on what basis, and what relationship, if any, exists between those approvers and the contractors benefiting from the inflated awards. It must also answer the fundamental question that no official has yet been willing to ask out loud.
When a contractor bids one hundred percent above the engineer’s estimate and wins the contract anyway, someone made that decision. The Guyanese public deserves to know who that someone is, and that person, whether an engineer, a supervisor or a procurement officer, must know that their career and their license are on the line.
SOURCE: Opinion, Guyana1News, April 22, 2026
