Deputy PM says BERT necessary

The Barbados Economic Recovery and Transformation (BERT) Programme is a necessary tool to kickstart more sustainable growth for the island.

That was the contention of Deputy Prime Minister Santia Bradshaw as she defended the Government’s decision to create a three-year BERT plan which will be funded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to follow the recently ended initial four-year economic programme.

Speaking during Tuesday’s debate in the House of Assembly on a Resolution to take note of the BERT Plan 2022, she said the administration had to correct years of stagnation and mismanagement under the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) government.

Bradshaw said although the main target of BERT 2.0 is economic growth, the recovery plan would not have been necessary if the previous administration had done their due diligence and kept the country on a steady path.

The senior minister said the 2021 Auditor General’s report had pointed to several instances of the DLP’s mismanagement at state-owned enterprises like the Barbados Water Authority (BWA).

“We had a project in the BWA, one relating to the construction of the Grandview Reservoir [at Government Hill, St Michael] that was supposed to cost $6 million. The Auditor General report alluded to the fact that there was no clear basis for the selection of the contractor; there was no evidence that the Authority at the time sought to find other firms to construct the reservoir.

“In fact, the company that was engaged then hired another firm and the revised reconstruction cost was set at $23.93 million. I start here because I think it is important to understand the road that we have travelled to get to a point where an economic team has had to put together a recovery plan because we came and found contracts of this nature in state-owned enterprises,” the Deputy Prime Minister said.

She drew fellow Parliamentarians’ attention to other questionable transactions identified by the Auditor General, for which no satisfactory answers had been given.

“I raise these issues again because we don’t often go back to the Auditor General reports to see what was unravelled, where the problems were, who perhaps should have got locked up…. We don’t go there enough. The reality is, it tells a tale that we must never forget and we must never allow people to come with their fancy language to distract us from what we have come here by the people of this country to be able to do,” Bradshaw added. (SB)