Construction Professional Steve Keightley - Smith believes that skilled mentorship is important if the Construction industry is to attract young people in the industry. He shares his experience on this subject while he was working on a project in the DRC and they had to import experienced skilled labourers from Zimbabwe to mentor the locals.
In 2012 we received our first standalone civil job for Kongola Copper Mine (KCC) in the Luilu processing plant in Kolwezi. One of the challenges we had was to find experienced civil construction workers to do the job. The DRC had gone through a civil war from 1998 to 2003 and development and civil construction was only slowly getting going, mainly around the copper & cobalt mines. There was a lot of development taking place and anyone that had skills was already employed. We realised we need to do something different to make the job that had a tight program, a success.
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| Map to Kolwezi, DRC. |
We were busy with a big job on a platinum mine in Zimbabwe, but that program was under pressure and we could not spare any of the skilled construction employees that we had there. We arranged to interview a number of skilled workers in Harare and after a number of interviews, we had a short list of the skills we were looking for, 2 experienced shutter-hands, 2 concrete hands and a steel-fixer. Obviously, it would have made more sense to recruit our skilled workers in Zambia which would have been a lot closer to the DRC, but we had no experience of working in Zambia, and at the time we did not have any reliable contacts there.
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It is +- 1,300 km from Harare to Kolwezi, and it’s a French speaking country with a different culture to Zimbabwe, so it was a leap of faith in us for the five Zimbabwean’s to agree to our offer of employment. As part of the employment conditions, we would accommodate and feed the skilled workers in the mine arranged accommodation camp on site. The next challenge was how to get them to the site. We gave them a travel and accommodation allowance to find their own way to the Kasaumbalesa border, where we had a contact who would meet them there. They took the bus from Harare to Chirundu +- 330 kms, went through the border into Zambia, took a bus to Lusaka +- 130kms, spend the night there then a bus to Kabwe, then to Ndola and finally to the border at Kasaumbalesa, +- 450 kms from Lusaka.
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| Road to Kolwezi |
Our contact met them at the border, took them to Lubumbashi, where they spend the night and then put them on the bus to Kolwezi the next morning. The road to Kolwezi was +- 300 kms long and it was under construction. There were some very bad sections of the road, as there were many trucks using it to get material to and from the copper mines. In the rainy season it was a real challenge. The busses were also a huge experience as they were packed, aggressively driven and brightly painted and did not stop for anything apart from scheduled stops. They had to be aggressive with all the trucks running on the road. |
| Lubumbashi Bus to Kolwezi. |
They arrived in Kolwezi and one of our team on site met them at the bus station and took them to site where they were booked into the mine accommodation camp. The next day they were taken to site and introduced to the already employed Congolese workers.
We were busy with a number of extra small jobs before our main contract, to build the foundations for a new roaster plant started. This was a good introduction for the Zimbabweans as there was not the same pressure to get the job done as there would be, later. They also found that they could communicate with the local Congolose workers in Swahilli which is not too dissimilar to Shona spoken in Zimbabwe. Not many of the local Congolese workers spoke English, which was a problem for our staff, but one of our senior staff on site was French speaking so he could communicate with the local in French.
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| Some of the Small Extra Jobs |
The Zimbabweans also found a number of other Zimbabweans working at the mine accommodation camp and Zambians working for other contractors on site which helped reassure them that they had made a good decision to come and work in the DRC. It took a few weeks for them to settle down and start getting to know the local workers, but we noticed a big improvement in the quality and the productivity of the teams once the Zimbabweans arrived.
We then started with our roaster foundation job. Excavation down +- 2 m, expose the piles that were already installed, breaking out the top of the piles, casting blinding, shuttering, fixing the steel. We had +- 30 local workers already employed at that stage and the foreman and young engineer on site could not direct, control and teach all 30 new workers and still maintain reasonable progress, so the team was broken down into smaller teams with the Zimbabweans looking after each section, as working charge hands. Each team under a charge hand specialized in the trade that the charge hand was most experienced, so the two shutter-hands worked with shuttering teams, the concrete charge hands looked after concreting teams and the steel-fixer charge hand the steel fixing, but they did not stick to their trades. If we were steel-fixing then we used all the available people, the same with excavation, concrete pouring, shuttering and scaffold erection. So all the employees we had, gained experience in all aspects of civil engineering construction.
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| Excavation Complete, Piles Trimmed, Blinding in & Steel fixing in Progress. |
The job was not a big job, but it was particularly challenging in that it had the main roaster foundation sitting on piles, big hexagon walls +-6 m high with a +- 3 m high x 500 thick ring beam on the top, plus a number of circular tanks foundation also on piles plus the main building foundation on piles with big holding down bolts, pump and other steelwork foundations and bolts, drains and sloping floors.
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| Roaster Foundation Under Construction. |
As the Zimbabwean workers were our core skilled workers it was important that when they went home for the agreed one week every 2 months on site, they did not all go home together. We staggered their trips home, and they would leave the camp at Kolwezi on a Friday afternoon, take the bus through to Lubumbashi, spend the night at Lubumbashi and our contact there, would take them the 90 kms to Kasabalesa. They would go through the border post at Kasabalesa and meet another contact in Zambia and he would drive them the +-600 kms through Zambia and drop them at Chirundu border post. They would then take the bus to Harare. They would be in Harare that evening.
We made sure we got them home as quickly as possible and in return they made sure they worked hard on site, lead by example and trained up the local workers.
The pressure on the job increased as we got closer to the end date in December. The team were working long hours, the delays we had experienced in getting good tools, equipment and shuttering into the DRC had been overcome and the site team had the material they needed. Contacts had been established to provide the reinforcing steel HD bolts and ready- mix concrete and mobile cranes.
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| Steel & Equipment being installed. |
The highlight of this job was when we returned to the site a few months after the job had finished to sort out some outstanding contractual issues, and we did a tour of the overall site to see how the job was progressing. There were numerous teams and contractors working all over the site but at just about every team we passed there would be a number of workers that had worked with us on the Roaster foundation and they would recognize us and greet us with great happiness. When we finished the job at Kolwezi, we had given notice and paid off all our local employees, but they had been snapped up by the local contractors and were now continuing there careers as experienced construction workers.
Our decision to employ the experienced Zimbabwean team had been vindicated and with overcoming the other challenges in working in the DRC resulted in a reasonably successful contract.
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