OPINION: Racial and ideological dynamics of the construction sector

Gundo Maswime says that the main risks highlighted as responsible for delays in timeous commencement and completion of construction projects can be resolved, he believes the real risk, is the trust deficit between a sector that used to be very patriotic to one government and is now battling to trust another government.

There is a pervasive social dynamic that is manifesting within the South African construction sector that has an impact on the sector’s ability to optimise its role in economic recovery as envisioned by the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan. In the president’s address, the main risks highlighted as responsible for delays in timeous commencement and completion of construction projects are; legislative complexities and contradictions, the stoppage of projects by “aspiring contractors”, delays in issuing of water use licences and environmental green light. These are problems that can be resolved. The real risk, however, is the trust deficit between a sector that used to be very patriotic to one government and is now battling to trust another government.

The South African construction sector was very nationalistic between 1924 and 1994 that it needed nominal regulation to achieve what the government wanted to see. For all policy positions prior to 1994, the industry knew exactly how it was supposed to position itself to assist the state. In reference to the state back then, the engineer used to say “our government…” as opposed to the common use of “the government…” that you often hear in the private sector today.

After the plague that ravished Cape Town in 1904 and Johannesburg in 1906, medical science suspected that the poor living conditions of “natives” in urban centres were responsible for the rapid spread of the disease. Their suspicion was confirmed after the 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu. Following these events, the provision of basic sanitation to native neighbourhoods in the cities begun along with a massive relocation project that moved ‘non-Europeans’ to the periphery of urban centres. This relocation was to repeat itself in industrial scale in the 1950s after the group areas act came into effect.

During these relocations, the construction fraternity or more precisely, the civil engineering community somehow knew that the infrastructure to be provided to native settlements in and out of the city centres were supposed to be of a lower quality. To this effect, Civil Engineering design codes and guidelines were overlooked in many instances to ensure that the state did not spend money on people that can not afford to pay for the capital outlay and the subsequent maintenance of the infrastructure. Sub-standard materials were used in water pipelines and sewer reticulation pipes in such areas as Evaton in the Vaal, Langa in the Cape, Umlazi in Natal and the list would go on. Engineers across the country understood that it had to be done like that without anyone telling them. They were embedded in state thinking and imbued in its ideology of separate but not equal. Where tar roads were built, in many instances, they were too narrow for the fire truck and the garbage truck to navigate and almost always without the wide side-walks of Deinfern in Joburg and Umhlanga Rocks in Durban North. In some places, sewerage spillage is still a common feature because of sub-standard pipes that also share the same network with stormwater.

Today, engineers are so law abiding that they are not willing to take on any risk that is not expressly stipulated in the contractual relationship they have with the public sector client. They would rather let the project collapse than solve simple community matters they are well versed in by virtue of having a permanently placed resident engineer on the project. There is a Spanish adage that translates as “for my friends and family, everything goes, but for everyone else…the law”. This means I am willing to break the rules and make a plan if I know you, if I don’t, then I will apply the rules to the latter. This is what the consulting engineering fraternity does to the states very often.

There is a public policy phenomenon called representative bureaucracy. This is when the bureaucracy is comprised by people that live and form part of the community they serve. They come with an innate ideological disposition and an intimate knowledge of the communities they serve. They don’t require to be told what to do. They know it and they are appointed with the knowledge that they know what needs to be done. In other words, an engineer from Alexandra township would have a certain perspective that his colleague from Sandton may not have and this may come through in his design approach and assist in evading some common pitfalls that engineers become victims to in the decisions they make during design.

All those years, the South African Engineer was like a chicken contributing an egg to please the master (analogy lifted from George Owell’s Animal Farm). It was a small contribution to a cause the engineer accented to. Until 1981, the state had not thought of allowing africans to become engineers. At least not in numbers that can have an impact on the industry’s make up. When sanctions started biting and the economy needed to be defibrillated, the chairperson of the Afrikaner Brotherhood, Dr Johan de Lange was commissioned to look into education and training as a way of removing the bottleneck on the critical path of rapid economic growth in the face of international isolation. In his report, producing more engineers were central to the economic development and just like President Ramaphosa told the nation in October 2020, the construction sector carried the hopes for economic recovery and job creation. However, it was also determined that every white student that can become an engineer that wants to be an engineer has become and engineer. The government faced the reality of having to train engineers of other races.

In the public deliberations that followed the De Lange report, it was noted that opening graduate engineering training to “natives” would mean that by year 2000, South Africa would have the same number of black as it will have white engineers. This option was canned with a concession of giving quotas to universities on the training of non-white engineers. The requirement for blacks to apply to both the university and the state was waivered as a result. The state opted to recruit engineers from Europe, the United States, Israel and all such ideologically nice places. It was not enough but it was safer. It was also very costly to entice comfortable Europeans engineers to come to the African jungle and leave their relatives. The engineers recruited through this initiative were also not keen to work outside the nice suburbs where they lived unlike what the Cuban engineers recruited recently by the current government seem to do. But the state was confident that their ideology was worth paying a fortune for.

When 1994 came, we had a state going in one direction and a construction industry going in another. This is because before 1990, the country had never produced more than 50 black engineers in one year and the few they produced had to leave the country to get experiential training because South African firms were not ready to employ them and irritate “their” government. Truman Goba was one of these expatriate engineers. There were very few black engineers with close association to the new government and too few white engineers that were ideologically attuned to the new state. The policies of the new government pertaining to the human settlement and construction sector had to be drafted mainly by experts from the world bank and engineers of the departing regime attached to Urban Foundation and the commercial banks. The new government made it clear that it needed a transformed industry that opened its gates to all South Africans. The Reconstruction and Development Program was implemented with key personnel associated to the National Party government. The new government were the ceremonial leaders of the program. Saki Macozoma remarked later that as an unintended outcome of contestation over the emerging character of the South African state, politics became the priority over efficiency and effectiveness. According to Macozoma, incredible energy was put into getting the politics right than getting the state to be efficient and effective.

While many reasons were advanced for the failure of the Reconstruction and Development Program, there is one that Patrick Bond in his book, Elite Transition refers to. It was the realization that the state would not mount any credible transformative program using officials that do not believe in their politics as key personnel. Many engineering design office floors today have normalized talking about their main client, the state, as corrupt and inept. In government corridors, the talks are about how private sector engineers were stopped from evaluating bids because of their corrupt collusion with contractors and how treasury had to quickly stop using the engineer’s estimate as a basis for awarding construction tenders because of the sheer quantum of corruption of the process by contractors and engineers in the private sector.

In state institutions, the corruption of the private sector engineer is viewed as more vile because it is also steeped to undermine transformation. It manifests as collusion like what we saw in 2010 world cup projects and the fronting that is pervasive. At the bottom, in the private sector are young engineers that play along with their seniors but do not like what they are hearing from the bosses. Some of these younger engineers end up in government and have the awkwardness of having to appoint companies that they know have very unflattering things to say behind their back. In many instances, government officials are trying too hard to not be seen as corrupt even where they are not. The sentiment of corruption is too heavy for the honest government official because even the service provider sees corruption even when it is not there.

The public sector and the private sector must understand that they are equally responsible for the betterment of the lives of all South Africans. Even if they cannot be friends, they have a professional duty. Furthermore, the imperative of transformation is a national imperative and an integral part of nation building. The industry has no option but to transform right across its value chain. The “soft acrimonies” within the construction sector must not threaten the plans to rebuild the economy and the stability of the country if they remain subliminal for the reason of protecting livelihoods. There will be no winners if the bickering continues.

Also read: The difference between Private and Public Sector Project Management

It is encouraging to see out reach initiatives by government and professional associations in the construction industry where both sides exchange ideas and aspirations. On every platform, each sector must start speaking openly about their stereotypes and anxieties. Let each engagement be a “CODESA” moment of brutal honesty where we make ourselves vulnerable. Let there be no praise singing from lips that do not believe what they are singing. If the industry does not, for example, believe certain aspects of the District Development Model, let it make that known to the state. And let the state have the requisite affability to accept constructive input from the sector. We will be surprised to realize that we have more in common than we have different.

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