Consulting Engineers South Africa (Cesa) on Thursday called on the government to commit to increased and informed spending on infrastructure as a key economic driver ahead of the State of the Nation Address (Sona) this month.
Olu Soluade, the president of Cesa, as he presented his theme ‘Make a Difference by Collaborating for Change’ for 2023 at its presidential media address yesterday, said the government needed to overcome the current supply chain and procurement issues as well as the skills challenges the country faced.
He said: “The pace at which this is happening needs to be accelerated when one considers the urgency needed.”
Soluade added: “Cesa’s hope is that with the government’s focus on professionalising the state that we will start to see the right people with the requisite skills, experience and competencies being placed in key positions to ensure that money is spent in a cost-effective manner for both the social and economic benefit of the people of our country.”
At the 2022 Cesa Infrastructure Indaba, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana said: “Our problem is not funding, it is also not skills, the problem is corruption and crime. Corruption and crime together with supply chain issues are the primary limiting factors affecting the delivery of sustainable social and economic infrastructure in our country.”
Soluade said, “What our country is currently experiencing is the result of years of inadequate supply chain and procurement management focused on least-cost procurement. Cesa believes that the correct approach should be to include the total cost of lifecycle ownership when procuring infrastructure – cheap simply does not last and puts lives at stake.”
Through industry collaboration Cesa said it was involved in the compilation of the new Public Procurement Bill that was due to go before Parliament in the near future. The bill promised to ensure that the procurement of infrastructure was treated differently from that of general goods and services.
Meanwhile, Soluade raised the issue of a shortage of skills.
“As far as grassroots development and the skills challenge, there is a critical need for adequate and competent engineering capacity within the government. We need to consider how best to address this challenge in the short, medium and long term,” said Soluade.
“In the short term, with the shortage of experienced engineering capacity within the public sector, the partnership with the private sector is the easiest to implement,” he said.
In the medium term, South Africa needed to boost skills in the public sector in line with the Framework for Professionalising the State pronounced on by President Cyril Ramaphosa in 2022, so that these individuals would become the future custodians of our public infrastructure, having been mentored by those who would then have fully retired.
“In the long term, an issue that is not receiving the attention required is the development of our skills pipeline, which needs to start at grassroots level – it is a long-term objective that as a country we need to address. Early childhood development (ECD) and basic education is the gateway to Stem careers, sustainably and systemically enabling the development of home-grown engineering skills for a transformed society and a transformed industry,” said Soluade.
Cesa said it was calling on the government to strengthen ECD and Basic Education programmes with a strong focus on teaching and learning of pure mathematics and science at basic education levels and boosting career guidance to promote engineering studies as a career of choice at tertiary level.
BUSINESS REPORT