Pres­i­dent of the Joint Con­sul­ta­tive Coun­cil (JCC), Fazir Khan, has re­spond­ed to Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s re­cent state­ment that bil­lions have been spent on road­works with “hard­ly any good road to show”. He called for greater tech­ni­cal over­sight and the use of new­ly im­ple­ment­ed pro­cure­ment tools to en­sure ac­count­abil­i­ty.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Khan ac­knowl­edged that road­works un­der­tak­en close to elec­tions have his­tor­i­cal­ly raised con­cerns about qual­i­ty and ac­count­abil­i­ty.

“While we know his­tor­i­cal­ly that road­works car­ried out just be­fore an elec­tion tend to be ques­tion­able, the JCC does not have the in­for­ma­tion at this time to make a blan­ket state­ment about val­ue for mon­ey re­gard­ing re­cent road con­tracts,” he said.