An in­ter­na­tion­al search for a new Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO) of the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) is ex­pect­ed to be­gin in a mat­ter of days and some­one to lead the au­thor­i­ty to be ap­point­ed by Jan­u­ary 2023.

In an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian (SBG), WASA’s Chair­man Ravi Nan­ga said the Au­thor­i­ty wants to at­tract the best tal­ent.

Nan­ga said, “By the end of this month the job de­scrip­tion will be fi­nalised for the CEO and those man­agers and we will go out to ad­ver­tise and re­cruit.”

When do you ex­pect to have a new CEO in WASA?

Nan­ga: “We are look­ing to­wards Jan­u­ary, be­cause the ad­ver­tise­ments will go out by the be­gin­ning of Sep­tem­ber, by let’s say the mid­dle of Oc­to­ber we will close off the ap­pli­ca­tion process, and be­tween the mid­dle of Oc­to­ber to De­cem­ber we will do the needy.”

And this is an in­ter­na­tion­al search?

Nan­ga: “Every­thing, in­ter­nal, ex­ter­nal, re­gion­al, in­ter­na­tion­al, be­cause we need to at­tract the best tal­ent for the amount of work that we have.”

The new look WASA will have eight ex­ec­u­tive mem­bers and he said the present oc­cu­pants are free to ap­ply for the new po­si­tions.

Nan­ga said WASA had been a hor­ror sto­ry which the Board and gov­ern­ment were try­ing to put right.

“I think every­body knows the prob­lem with WASA....giv­en where WASA is to­day, we did not get there overnight, we have start­ed the trans­for­ma­tion.”

Nan­ga said a big part of the chal­lenge at the Au­thor­i­ty was the lack of a stan­dard op­er­at­ing pro­ce­dure for most things and even where they were, they were not be­ing fol­lowed.

“It was dif­fi­cult to dis­ci­pline per­sons, it was dif­fi­cult to track how things were go­ing, so we start­ed to put those things in place,” WASA’s Chair­man told the SBG.

Nan­ga said when he was made Chair­man, it was clear that the man­age­ment was not co­op­er­at­ing with the Board to move the com­pa­ny for­ward and it was he who went to the Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les and asked for changes to the then ex­ec­u­tive.

“One of the things I asked for was to re­place the ex­ec­u­tive.... as a Board we were not hap­py where we were from De­cem­ber to Ju­ly, take for ex­am­ple GPS units, its a mat­ter of just in­stalling a piece of equip­ment, we had the equip­ment, so from the Jan­u­ary Board meet­ing, that was our first for­mal Board meet­ing, I kept on say­ing, we need to start em­brac­ing tech­nol­o­gy, and month af­ter month ex­cus­es, its not ready, this that and the oth­er dif­fer­ent sorts of ex­cus­es and that’s what per­vad­ed across the board, I told the Min­is­ter when I was asked to as­sume to Chair­man­ship we were not get­ting the sup­port that we need­ed from the ex­ec­u­tive so he said by all means go ahead, change the ex­ec­u­tive. We changed the ex­ec­u­tive and the GPS units were in­stalled in two months,” WASA’s Chair­man re­vealed.

He said there have been in­cre­men­tal changes and the Board is be­gin­ning to see the im­prove­ments.

Told that the coun­try does not re­al­ly care about the in­ter­nal wran­gling at the WASA but in­stead is con­cerned about get­ting a safe and re­li­able sup­ply of wa­ter Mr Nan­ga agreed. But he want­ed the coun­try to al­so be fair to the util­i­ty.

“Of course you will not hear those com­mu­ni­ties that are for the first time get­ting wa­ter, you will not hear that, you will con­tin­ue to hear all the hor­ror sto­ries, which I ac­cept there are a lot, but we are work­ing to fix them,” he ex­plained.

Nan­ga claimed more than 60 per­cent of the coun­try gets wa­ter sev­en days a week, 24 hours a day.

He said the trans­for­ma­tion will lead to a di­vi­sion of the au­thor­i­ty in­to five sep­a­rate ar­eas, North West, North East, Cen­tral, To­ba­go and South. The WASA Chair­man ar­gued that this di­vi­sion at the lev­el of the ex­ec­u­tive will lead to greater fo­cus on de­liv­er­ing op­er­a­tional­ly and more ac­count­abil­i­ty.

He said, “Those ar­eas are pret­ty flex­i­ble now, once we get on the ground the bor­ders will be shift­ed to en­sure that all the area man­agers have an equal, or as close to an equal amount of work as pos­si­ble, so where­as you were tack­ling things like pot­holes, leak re­pairs etc on a coun­try-wide lev­el, we are now go­ing to hold the re­gion­al man­agers ac­count­able.”

Say­ing the main chal­lenge in WASA has been the qual­i­ty of the man­age­ment at the Au­thor­i­ty, the Chair­man told the SBG, “Yes those 426 po­si­tions will be made re­dun­dant and that will be sub­sumed in­to about 220 plus man­age­r­i­al po­si­tions. So that from those 426, tech­ni­cal­ly two hun­dred and some­thing can come back. Every­body is free to ap­ply, but of course we have par­tic­u­lar things we are look­ing for.”

He point­ed to one ex­am­ple of why the man­age­ment could not per­form, “Imag­ine part of WASA’s man­age­ment be­long to the union. So you had an in­ces­tu­ous re­la­tion­ship go­ing where you had mem­bers of a union hav­ing to dis­ci­pline their own mem­bers and of course it was not hap­pen­ing.”

Nan­ga said 50 per­cent of WASA’s wa­ter con­tin­ues to be lost but does not know what the pre­cise fig­ure is and does not know the pre­cise fig­ure of the lines that have to be re­placed.

“We have start­ed map­ping the leaks. So we have gone out on a mas­sive leak re­pair pro­gramme, but as quick­ly as we re­pair leaks, oth­er leaks are show­ing up, so that tells you, you have an is­sue with you line. So we have start­ed look­ing along which trans­mis­sion sys­tem you have these re­peat leaks com­ing up,” Nan­ga said.

He added, “It will cost in ex­cess of a bil­lion dol­lars, but again it is not to say, we are go­ing to do the full trans­for­ma­tion now, we are go­ing to do it in­cre­men­tal­ly as funds be­come avail­able. So we will have to pri­ori­tise. So for ex­am­ple even be­fore the trans­for­ma­tion was ap­proved in con­junc­tion with the Min­istry, we de­vel­oped the CWIP pro­gramme, Com­mu­ni­ty Wa­ter Im­prove­ment Project, so that was tar­get­ing per­sons with one in nine (days re­ceiv­ing wa­ter) or ze­ro, no wa­ter sup­ply at all, and we iden­ti­fied low-cost projects with a high im­pact.”

Nan­dal told the SBG there was no stan­dard op­er­at­ing pro­ce­dure for the re­pairs of leaks for the road re­pair.

“We had an is­sue in Diego Mar­tin where WASA con­tin­ued to re­pair a leak, we would patch it back, a week lat­er it re­de­vel­ops, the same leak, we did that about three or four times. Even­tu­al­ly the Min­istry of Works was called in and they re­alised that WASA was not re­pair­ing it prop­er­ly. There was not suf­fi­cient com­paction, so when you cov­er and have traf­fic flow­ing, you have the vi­bra­tion and it is caus­ing the leak,” Nan­ga gave as an ex­am­ple.

He promised qual­i­ty con­trol and that there will be con­trac­tors en­sur­ing roads are repaved prop­er­ly.

Nan­ga al­so talked about plans to place more of the lines to the side of the road and cre­ate a sem­blance of util­i­ty cor­ri­dor along ma­jor ar­ter­ies and he stressed the use of tech­nol­o­gy as an ex­am­ple.

The WASA chair­man point­ed to Wrigh­ston Road and the fact that there have not been leaks there and he cred­its that with the tech­nol­o­gy em­ployed dur­ing the con­struc­tion of the wa­ter­front al­most twen­ty years ago which en­sured the re­li­a­bil­i­ty and chang­out of some of the lines in that area.