The Regional Democratic Council of Region Eight is back at the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board on May 20 trying to find a new contractor to finish a school dormitory that was supposed to be completed three years ago — and the rebuild advertised in Wednesday’s Guyana Chronicle is being put out at $120.7 million, less than half the $285 million the original contract was awarded for in 2021.
The dormitory was meant to house 300 students attending the troubled Kato Secondary School, itself a $1 billion-plus project that opened in 2018 already plagued by delays and defects from its own original 2012 contract. Region Eight Regional Executive Officer Peter Ramotar signed the dormitory contract with Reiaz Akbar General Construction Services in September 2021. The Auditor General’s 2024 report flagged the site as troubled. By mid-2025 it was clear the original contract had failed entirely.
The math is the part that should travel. If the dormitory genuinely can be finished for $120.7 million, the original $285 million award contained at minimum $164 million in either unbuilt scope, overpricing, or money that simply does not appear in the structure now standing at Kato. For diaspora families with relatives in the hinterland who rely on residential secondary schools to keep their children in education past age 12, the procurement failure has cost them three school years of capacity already.
What the new bid does not address is what happened to the $285 million originally disbursed. That is the question the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board is not designed to answer, and it is the question that will need to be put to the Auditor General and the Public Accounts Committee — not just for Kato, but as a template for how to read every regional capital project where the Auditor General has flagged irregularities and the procurement system has quietly moved on.