In his response to the article Artisan Roles Provide Viable Work Opportunities For SA’s Youth Steve Keightley-Smith a Construction Professional with over 45 years experience shares his site experience in Botswana as he motivates the unemployed youth to consider career as a construction artisan
In 1997-98 I was involved with the Orapa Project 2000
project in Botswana. This was to expand the size of the existing diamond
recovery plant at Orapa diamond mine and to double its capacity. It was a
relatively big Civil Engineering project in those days and in a relatively
isolated area in Botswana. +- 200 kms West of Francistown, +- 400 kms North of
Gabarone and +- 700 kms North West of Johannesburg.
View of Silos,
Conveyors and Scrubbing & Screening Building.
We had a staff of +- 70 people with a labour force of +- 550
people. One of the biggest challenges on the job was to find sufficient skilled
workers to do all the work that needed to be done. The clients was De Beers
Diamond Mine and the Botswana Government with Anglo American managing the
project.
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As normal for any cross- border work it was a requirement to
employ as many local Batswana citizens as possible. We placed large notices in
the Botswana papers and especially in Letlhakane, (population +- 23,000 people)
the closest village to Orapa (20 Kms away) and also in Francis town (population
+- 99,000, 200 kms away,) listing the skills we required, and the years of
experience needed. There was a fair amount of civil engineering work going on
in Botswana at the time, as they were busy with the North South water pipeline,
pump-stations, reservoirs and new township developments, but the skills we
required were for big heavy civil engineering structures and there had not been
too much of that type of work in Botswana in the preceding years. We did not
get too many responses.
The Scrubbing
& Screening Building under Construction.
To get work permits for the staff and skilled labour that we
needed to do the job, was a complex and attention to detail job. Each person had
to complete a +- 20 item check list and needed to supply information ranging
from the standard, name, ID, address, `passport number, copies of ID, copies of
passport, highest educational qualifications, copies of the qualifications, school
they attended, highest school qualification, copies of school qualifications,
list of experience, references from company, references from friends, etc etc.
Each
person also needed to have a current medical certificate done by an Occupational
accredited medical practitioner. We also needed a police clearance certificate
for each person as this was a big diamond mine. Most of the information was
standard information that the company already had, as standard employment
practices, but there were some items that each employee needed to provide.
Some of our employees did not have passports, so we needed
to help them apply for passports. Many them did not have formal recognized
qualifications and most of them did not have copies of their school
qualifications.
The most interesting part of this exercise was to find out
that our highly skilled civil engineering workforce had not had high school
schooling. This had never been an issue working all over South Africa, as each
employee had been recognized for the skills and experience that they had,
and not for their educational qualifications.
The program for the job was extremely tight and we needed to
decide on which teams we were going to need on site, organize a cross border
staff and skilled labour agreement, organize plant and equipment, transport,
logistic arrangements, import permits, etc, etc. The normal startup of a big
civil site where you need 25 hours in a day to sort out all the details.
We submitted many work permit applications and most of the
staff applications were approved as they had acceptable qualifications and
experience, but the majority of our skilled labour applications were rejected. We
were told that Botswana had a lot of people with only a standard 3 education
and they did not need more from South Africa in Botswana. There were urgent meets
with the client, phone calls to the Department of Labour, meetings in Gabarone
and even meetings with the Minister of Labour. We managed to get some of our
key skilled employees work permits accepted, so we could make a start on site,
but the majority were rejected. In each rejection case, we then had to resubmit
all the information, pay more fees, and wait up to 2 weeks to get the
applications rejected, again.
Steel Fixing +- 4
m below Ground Level.
We had also employed a South African Civil Engineering (CEITS)
trainer and accreditor to run our training program on site. We had meeting with
the Botswana Civil Engineering Training Trust Fund in Gabarone (their
equivalent of CEITS in South Africa) had our trainer accredited in Botswana and
set up a training camp in Letlhakane, where every new employee would go through
an initial training program of 2 days. There they would be trained on safety
and introduced to the different equipment that would be used on site and the
normal civil engineering work routine. The trainer would also assess each new
employee and those employees that showed promise would be noted and earmarked
for more specialist training.
Traditionally, many of our semi- skilled employees started
their working lives as general labourers. They would be recruited though the
Human Resources Department, mainly from the Eastern Cape, though an already
employed friend, brother, cousin, etc as a reference, and historically the
company had found that this was a successful way to manage the labour challenges.
They all spoke the same language, they had similar cultures, lived together in
communal single quarters, cooked, and ate together.
Concrete Silos 30
m High
They all needed to be physically fit as civil construction
is hard work. If you ever have had experience of shoveling concrete or carrying
heavy steel shutters or reinforcing bars, then you will know what it is like.
The average temperature at Orapa was +-26 deg C but it could go up to 46 deg C
in mid- summer. Most civil engineering
tenders were based on a shutter-hands erecting 2m2 of shuttering/day a steel-fixer
fixing 250 kg of reinforcing steel/ day and a concrete-hand placing 4m3 of
concrete/day, a general labourer, excavating 1-4 m3/day depending on the soil
conditions. Therese are general tender figures and it will obviously vary
depending on the site conditions.
Construction labour also needed to have a head for heights,
as many of the structures are high off the ground or quite deep underground.
Most of the structures at Orapa had foundations 2-3 m deep and the Jet sump was
+- 8 m deep and then went up 10- to 20 m high. The silos at Orapa were +- 30 m
high, the Scrubbing and Screening building was +- 40 m high and the Recovery
building was 95 m high.
Employees needed to climb down ladders to get to the bottom
of the excavations, trim the excavations, pour blinding, fix shutters and
reinforcing steel and then cast the concrete. Then repeat the whole process
again, to get out from below ground and up to the top of the structure. On
major structures, temporary steel staircases were used but on many of the
structures step ladders were used.
Alimak 540 Hoist
On the recovery
building, temporary steel staircases were used up to +- 40 m high and then an
Alimak construction hoist was used. This could take +- 15 people at a time and
saved climbing up the access stairs. The hoist mast sections were only 1.5 m
long and needed to be fixed to concrete that was at least 28 days old, so the
top of the hoist trailed the construction of the building by at least 4 weeks.
As we were averaging a floor ever 15 days that meant that access to the top 2
floors was either by ladders or the steel access stairs. Invariable there would
be a big queue outside the Alimak ground floor entrance in the morning to avoid
having to climb 10 or more flights of stairs to get to work.
95 m High Recovery
Building.
The two tower cranes that we had on the recovery building
were over 110 m high, so the two operators had to climb 110 m every morning
just to get to work. They carried bottles with them to avoid having to climb
down 110 m if they needed to go to the toilet. Occasionally when standing under
the tower cranes, rain would start falling. It does not rain much in Botswana
and when you would look up to the sky it would be the normal blue sky. It was
not rain that was falling on us.
Scrubbing
& Screening Building.
We were extremely lucky with our trainer as he got on well
with all the foremen. When he was not training in Letlhakane he would spend
time with all the foremen and their teams on site, and got to know a lot of the
individual team members. In conjunction with the foreman, he would earmark
individual members for further training and when the site conditions allowed,
they would be sent off to the training centre in Letlhakane for further
training. The labour force also enjoyed these training courses, as it was a bit
more relaxed than working on site and they were able to get off the mine for a
few days and enjoy some of a small village life. Eventually we moved the
training centre onto site for logistics purposes, much to the regret of the
employees.
Our Trainer
Presenting Certificates.
But not only was our trainer, training employees, he was
also testing them to enable them to get a CEITS and Botswana Training Trust
Fund accredited qualifications. On the shuttering side there are certain tests
in erecting shuttering that needs to be erected within a certain time and to a
certain quality. We delivered the required equipment to the training centre and
this enabled the trainer to test our employees. On the steel-fixing and
concrete placing side, the testing was done on site as the job was progressing.
Each employee had their own CV and the trainer would assess each CV, interview
them and then watch them on site while they were working.
Certificate
Presentation Ceremony.
By
the end of the contract, we had recruited over 400 local, (Botswana employees)
the majority of whom did not have Grade 12 school qualifications. They had had
the benefit of working with the +- 200 South African skilled and experienced
employees on a fairly complicated civil engineering project and had made a
success of the project. Which shows that with the right, training, attitude and
physical health and opportunity and even without a grade 12 schooling
certificate you can have a successful career in the construction industry. I
would be very interested to find out some of the stories of some of those employees
that had their first experience of the construction industry on this Orapa Project
2000 contract.
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