DPM as project manager?

This has been what the Star Online reported yesterday.

DPM Najib will be keeping count of each passing month to ensure that the new 1st Division Army headquarters complex at Muara Tuangproject would be completed on time.

He said: “In 45 months from now, I want this project to be finished. I don’t want it to become like the prison project, which has set such a bad example. Instead, I want this headquarters complex to be an example of a successfully implemented project.”

The bad example Najib was referring to is the Kuching prisons complex project which has been delayed for nine years and is not even half completed. Then Najib, who is also Defence Minister, later told the press that he had confidence in the contractor to do the job.

Here in this country, we have to have DPM and PM making this sort of warnings or advice (depending on how one wants to look at it) to contractors, when it should have been left to professional project managers or top civil servants.

It tells you something about our system of awarding contracts, doesn’t it?