Focus Media (Kigali)
18 July 2008
HBR and SSFR became clients of Thomas & Piron last year when the two institutions signed a contract with the Belgian company for the latter to build 234 houses at Kagugu in four phases.
The two government institutions were to pay the contractors a total of 8 billion francs during the four phases, the first of which was worth Frw 1.7 billion francs for 52 houses.
Now Thomas & Piron are saying they have completed work on the first phase and are demanding that the clients pay up the rest of the fee for this phase, which is Frw 1.2 billion. This sum would be in addition to Frw 500 million that the clients already have paid them in advances.
But, according to HBR and SSFR, the project is far from complete. And worse still, according to sources from within the two institutions, construction of the 52 houses has been unbelievably shoddy.
According to a source from HBR who requested to talk on conditions of anonymity, HBR and SSFR want their Frw 500 million back and are also considering terminating any further dealings with Thomas & Piron and taking them to court for breach of contract.
Focus asked SSFR director Henry Gaperi what the clients' problems with the contractor's work was and he said that to begin with Thomas & Piron have not yet installed the sewage system, and that a number of other "technical problems" mean the houses are not inhabitable.
"The first phase of the project should have ended last year in August but on top of the absent sewage system, the contractors haven't taken care of other technical issues we are demanding of them," Mr Gaperi said. He did not elaborate on what those technical issues are.
Mr Gaperi added, "We have fulfilled our obligations to the contractor but unfortunately they have not done what we expected of them."
He would not confirm whether they are considering suing the contractors.
Where to put the fridge?
As Focus was to find out, the SSFR director was being diplomatic in his choice of words. We paid a visit to the houses at Kagugu together with Coralie Piron, manager of Thomas & Piron (Rwanda) and her father and founding CEO of the company, Louis-Marie Piron who had flown into Kigali from Brussels to lodge complaints against the two institutions.
Mr and Ms Piron took us around the estate and then invited us into one of the houses. From outside, the houses look pretty and well built. But then one starts noticing things, such as supposedly parking space for cars in the compounds of some of the houses that is on a steep incline so that one wonders how one is supposed to drive their car up there (the Pirons did not take us into one of these).
What is one supposed to do for parking? We asked. "That is a problem that will be easily rectified," said Coralie Piron. Something else we noticed (inside the house they invited us in) was that the bathrooms looked rather cramped.
The kitchen definitely is tiny and when the door that leads into a tiny backyard opens inwards, there is no way two people can stand in there. Interestingly enough, this is a kitchen without a utensils board and it is hard to imagine how the board can fit in that little space together with the small, ordinary sink the contractor has installed grudgingly (apparently).
One thing is for sure about the kitchens of the houses constructed by Thomas & Piron at Kagugu-other than their lack of such basics as a utensils board, there is no way you can fit a fridge, a cooker, a toaster and other items of the kind that people normally own who can afford to buy houses of the price tag these ones carry.
They are for sale for Rwf 40 million an individual unit.
Elastic house help
The Pirons did not show us inside the quarters for the house help, claiming that they did not have the keys.
But on a second visit, without the Pirons but with somebody who could show us these quarters, we found out that the house-help in any of the 52 houses is supposed to sleep in a space that is smaller than a dog kennel. So the poor man or woman will have to spend nights curled up like a fetus.
That however is not the end of the house-help's tribulations. The bathrooms of the house-help are, in the words of one HBR employee, out of this world. It is a tiny space with a toilet bowl and the shower fawcett hangs directly over the bowl so that if the poor man or woman wants to shower they have to stand balanced on the bowl with the toilet, in addition to its normal purposes, serving as a water drain.
We took a look at one of the doors and got another surprise. The door cannot serve purposes doors normally serve, which is to cover an entrance from wall to wall. Instead there is a space between it and one of the walls so that a big snake traveling from the neighboring Kagugu bushes may enter unhampered.
According to a source familiar with advice that Waweru and Lakes Associates-an architectural consultancy in Kigali-gave to HBR and SSFR, even the dimensions of the houses are smaller than what is specified in the contract, the electricity cabling is poor and everything generally is totally substandard.
What were these people thinking, I asked myself as I looked around. (And what were they imagining when they took a couple of journalists-I and colleague Sam Ruburika who took photographs-to those defective houses?)
Belgian officials to the rescue
The answer may lie in a snippet of dialogue between old man Piron and a former employee of his, Serge Gasana, who was manager of Thomas & Piron (Rwanda) before Ms Piron took over.
According to an employee of the construction company who obviously did not want to be named, Mr Gasana informed Mr Piron one time last year that the clients were beginning to raise complaints about the quality of the work upon which the latter replied in French, "en Afrique la qualité ne compte pas!"
That is exactly what Louis-Marie Piron said: that in Africa things such as quality really do not matter.
Mr Piron has been raising complaints-to the President's office, to the Prime Minister's office, to the Belgian embassy, to the Belgian government-that the clients won't take delivery of a project that his company has "properly completed in full compliance with the contract."
According to a highly placed government source who requested not to be named, these days whenever Belgian embassy officials or visiting officials of the government of Belgium meet Rwandan officials, the first issue they raise is that of Thomas & Piron.
Our source informed us that they are constantly being accused of harassing the company even when none of the (Belgian government officials) has ever visited the site that has raised the dispute.
He also wondered how accusations of harassment could come about when Thomas & Piron actually wins more construction contracts than any other firm in Rwanda, including firms owned and run by Rwandans which could do the work very well.
Model house
Among the other big contracts that Thomas & Piron has won are work to refurbish and renovate the parliament building; to renovate and add a new wing to the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning; to put up a multi-storey building for SSFR in downtown Kigali and other projects.
Another senior government official we interviewed for this story was Finance and Economic Planning Minister James Musoni. He told Focus, "In the first place we do not know why the Thomas & Piron problem has become political question yet the issue is purely about the technical work on the houses."
Gervais Ntaganda, the director of the HBR declined to talk about the dispute.
We are informed however that a big part of the problem stems from him failing to supervise his project (the Kagugu houses are primarily a HBR project).
A source from within HBR who talked to us upon the promise we wouldn't name them said Mr Ntaganda should have obliged Thomas & Piron to first build a model house and then if it was up to standard include a clause obliging them to build all the houses according to that standard.
"But he did no such thing and see what has happened now," said our source.
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