Many civil engineers have taken notice of the recent media coverage of the government’s intervention in support of our business, as urged by SAFCEC, CESA, and other groups. We operate within a delicate ecology that is a gem in South Africa’s crown. In actuality, we are among the few nations in Africa that still has a robust and independent building sector. However, there is a problem for us. The ecology of the construction sector is a very delicate arrangement of interconnected and dependent entities, much like a biological ecosystem. When one is harmed or disrupted, the ecosystem as a whole suffers. Unintended outcomes are often caused by innocent tinkering.
Almost like lemmings, we have raced toward the brink and, with only a few inches remaining, we must decide whether to dig in and sort ourselves out or to just jump into the abyss, according to a recent LinkedIn post by Grinaker-LTA COO Gavin Taylor.
He goes on, “The simple fact is that since 2010, the unfavorable business climate has been getting worse, ushering in an era of unsustainable competition. This is combined with the inaccurately demonstrated belief held by dishonest developers, both in the public and private sectors, that “there will always be a company that will accept the risk and as long as they have a balance sheet, and we will continue pushing the risk down until they fail,” which has now reached a breaking point.
This process has got to change before we kill our industry and allow the large foreign businesses to take their place at our table. We should perhaps consider a move closer towards the French model where the lowest and highest bidders on any tender are excluded and the evaluation and award of contracts is not concluded on price alone.* I have not yet met the South African developer who walks that talk.
Likewise, professional consultants have been challenged to reduce their fees out of proportion and below industry agreed scales and in many cases have accepted incentives or penalties on performance in order to be awarded professional commissions, the upshot of which is that they have had to cut costs which has had the effect that expertise and staff compliment required to design and / or administer the project has not met with the required standard or where a design error has been made, the contractor has been an easy target to recoup a loss. This has been a contributing factor to the adversarial contracting style prevailing in our industry.
On the face of it, the better the documentation is at tender stage, the more robust the tender and the greater the predictability of the outcome will be. Too many projects are only half designed and poorly specified when they are started. Consultants should be appointed at industry agreed fee levels based on their design proposals and expertise of the team that they put forward for the specific project. The second thing that really makes my blood boil is that they should be independent (that’s why the industry fee scales were agreed in the first place) and I personally would view any developer with in-house consultancy services as a material risk if I was to consider contracting with them as there is no independence and if they choose this route why do they not have their own in-house construction team other than to mitigate risk.”
Mr Taylor raises several other issues that are contributing to the present critical situation. On employee competence, he says that: “Our curriculum in institutes of higher learning and trade schools are out of touch with the changing requirements of our industry. How are we going to get better without understanding the “competency tools” required to deliver quality consistently and having the curriculum to match those requirements. Gone are the days (in our industry) where newly qualified people were properly managed when first entering the work place and their competency supplemented by proper on the job training and career mapping, for them to collect the tools to grow and progress through the organisations.”
He also gives his opinion on the “Construction Mafia” and we urge you to read his article and leave your comments, whether you agree to his views or not. It is time that those left in the South African Construction industry realise that the envrionment they are working in is on life support and requires specialikst treatment if it is to recover from it’s latest cardiac arrest.
Please click here to read the full article (www.thhp.co.za)
