Samy wants Blow-job on Contractors

Samy Vellu is frustrated with the increasing number of abandoned projects and shoddy work by contractors, and he has decided to put people power into service.

The public will be invited to become the eyes and ears of the Works Ministry to prevent hanky-panky and reduce costs arising from the need to revive abandoned projects and repair slipshod work.

Works Minister Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu said this would be part of a code of ethics and a performance-appraisal system for contractors likely to be implemented next year.

He said it was aimed at preventing abuse of government projects.

The public could contact the Construction Industry Development Board Malaysia (CIDB) if they felt things were amiss with any government construction project.

Contractors will also have to sit for integrity courses design and conducted by CIDB.

"These are drastic measures. Once implemented, the code of ethics and appraisal system will have to be adhered to by contractors and CIDB will be the monitoring them.

Can we trust CIDB?

So far, since the inception, CIDB had done nothing tangible to help the contractors who had paid billions of dollars of contributions to them.

What they had done is to collect the 0.25% taxes from the contractors, organise some seminars for contractors of which the contractors who attended had to pay for it again, register workers and label them which cost the contractor another $360 per worker (tho' CIDB said they only charge $150 per pax, but I asked all the contractors, they said there is associated type of fees to be paid to runners).

Tan Sri Wan Rahman, since retiring from JKR as the D-G, and appointed as chairman of CIDB for more than a decade, he should have retired and exited and not cause us more pain and cost. The new CEO, Datuk Hamzah, he seems to be doing something ... but not visible till today. There is a lot of talk, no action (NATO). I observed, that he may be surrounded by what Zam called: Crony system propagators who had no certified credentials to prove but are good talkers and commercialmen. These talkers had done some jobs for CIDB, like (cut-and-paste) research papers on project management, which was dump into the dustbin and of which had cost CIDB some $150,000. There were some seminars orgainised by CIDB on the use of Microsoft Project Scheduling, and Bar Charts (Gantt Charts) were produced without the Critical Path Network (CPM).

Is Hamzah facing problem with his chairman or others, or being crowded with false prophets of project management? Only he can answer.

But CIDB till today, has nobody within, who can claim they had the project management knowledge competency ... CIDB had lobbied to the govt and was thus mandated to certify project managers but they themselves are not even certified by international project management bodies. Would they be brave enough to get themselves certified by PMI, AIPM, APM, or any reputable project management institutions worldwide?

Could CIDB make themselves relevant?

Datuk Hamzah, can you do it?

or do we wait for the next generation of Mat Rempit to do it?