It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The PNM Gov­ern­ment un­der Patrick Man­ning vir­tu­al­ly dec­i­mat­ed the lo­cal con­struc­tion sec­tor, de­stroy­ing its ca­pac­i­ty by sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly award­ing projects to Chi­nese con­trac­tors. Have we learned from our mis­takes? It seems not. It was an­nounced re­cent­ly that the pre­ferred bid­der for the UWI south cam­pus was Chi­na Jiang­su In­ter­na­tion­al. I would like to ask the ten­ders com­mit­tee the fol­low­ing ques­tions: How many lo­cal ar­chi­tects are to be em­ployed by Chi­na Jiang-su?

How many lo­cal en­gi­neers are to be em­ployed? How many lo­cal project man­agers? How many skilled and un­skilled lo­cal labour­ers? What (if any) lo­cal ma­te­ri­als are to be bought for the project? Where is the lo­cal con­tent on this project? The award­ing of this project to the Chi­nese is go­ing to de­prive thou­sands of lo­cals di­rect and in­di­rect jobs on this project. Jobs where the Gov­ern­ment will no longer be earn­ing tax dol­lars from lo­cal em­ploy­ment and com­pa­nies sup­ply­ing prod­ucts. Yet at the end over half a bil­lion of our tax dol­lars will be repa­tri­at­ed to Chi­na, and all we will be left with is a build­ing of ques­tion­able qual­i­ty, and maybe an­oth­er hun­dred or so more Chi­nese restau­rants. Shame on you, Prime Min­is­ter.

Stu­art Dal­gliesh

Diego Mar­tin