Construction firms penalized for shoddy work

The Genocide Survivors Fund (FARG) recently dragged to court 26 companies that had been contracted to build houses for vulnerable survivors but instead did shoddy work while others abandoned the projects unfinished.The contractors currently battling cases in the High Court are supposed to refund close to Rwf 598.3 million which the government lost in the process.Theophile Ruberangeyo, the Executive Secretary of FARG said on Friday that while the process of recovering the money was slow, there were some positive signs.“We are doing everything possible to recover the money, two companies have already paid back about Rwf 22 million,” Ruberangeyo explained in an interview.He revealed that four companies were wrongly sued and FARG has compensated them. Ruberangeyo explains that putting together all the records involving people who messed up FARG was tedious. He said that a steering committee put in place to conduct a household survey on the status of each of the houses that were built and the list of people responsible for any loss that was incurred, was in the final stage to get to the root cause of the matter.“We hope to finish everything this month and give a detailed report to the Prime Minister,” Ruberangeyo said in a telephone interview on Friday.“We hope the report will give all the details on who did what, what was supposed to be done and the way forward”.Some companies are said to have used substandard equipment or built cheap houses compared to what was required.In July this year, Juvenal Nkusi, the chairman of Parliamentary Accounts Committee (PAC), lashed out at FARG, saying the current status of houses “casts doubt if those responsible were competent.”

National

Construction firms penalized for shoddy work