The president of the Bahamian Contractors Association (BCA), Leonard Sands, said he wants to create a school for the construction industry out of the Bahamas Technical and Vocational Institute (BTVI), but demanded that Bahamian contractors first stop hiring foreigners.

During a conversation with Guardian Business yesterday, Sands talked about his desire to see the creation of a school for the construction sector, but admitted that the negative business practices hurting contractors are not always from foreigners.

"There is an issue when we have Bahamian contractors doing the same thing that foreign persons do. They bring in foreign project managers from Canada and England and wherever they find them from and bring them in where there are qualified Bahamians to do the same job. So we have to clean up our doorstep, too. We know this.

"Wrong is wrong wherever we find it. That has to be fixed if we want to talk about going out there and changing the industry we need to lead by example," he said.

And he added that when it comes to competing in The Bahamas, Bahamian contractors do not fare well against foreign contractors on high-dollar-value jobs.

"We are grossly at a disadvantage," he said.

At a disadvantage
Sands explained that the difficulty lay in advantages the foreign companies are able to access, which Bahamian companies, for many reasons, cannot. The example he gave was of a foreign company able to get large equipment on consignment, ship it to The Bahamas, do a multimillion dollar job, ship the equipment back to the dealer and pay for it out of the profits. Bahamian companies do not have such relationships, Sands said.

"They are operating from ,business to business, from a position of strength and we're in a position of weakness, so when they offer competitive pricing, we are doing it just to be at the competitive level. They can offer lower than us and still make a profit," he said.

Training academy
Sands pointed out that a lot of Jamaican workers in The Bahamas are carpenters, and that Jamaica has a training academy for carpenters.

"The question you should ask is, why doesn't The Bahamas have a training academy for carpenters? Its one of the most important skills and we don't train in it; and then we get upset when they bring in foreigners who do carpentry. We're not producing them. They have to come from somewhere," Sands said.

Questioned about the utility of BTVI in this regard, Sands agreed that while that may have been the original intent, the institute has become too much like a college.

"If they gave BTVI to us, I'd scrap half the programs at BTVI and make it a construction school for the country. So then, you'd get to tell all the foreigners who want to come in and be carpenters, 'Don't come; I'm producing carpenters here'. That's what BTVI should be. That's not who they are," he said.

Sands pointed out that the construction industry, a multi billion-dollar industry, does not have a school to feed talent into the industry.

"That's a problem," he said. "I'd like to fix it. I just need strong support from members and money."

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