Career engineers required for local service delivery

If South Africa is to come to grips with the debilitating problem of inadequate service delivery at particularly municipal and provincial government levels, greater urgency needs to be injected into the debate on and declared intentions to establish a more professional and depoliticised civil service corps. Working in professional positions in the government should become a career and not short-term contractual appointments. This was one of the main messages from the annual media breakfast of the Consulting Engineers South Africa (Cesa) last week. While also from other sources, the news was that the country is heading for a number of serious infrastructure-related crises.

Cesa President Zulch Lötter said that his organisation, representing 450 affiliated firms employing some 20 000 engineers, strongly supported the debates and discussions which were starting to take place about the political employment of senior staff and the creation of a depoliticised professional officialdom that served the government of the day with integrity. “The single biggest task is to get experienced staff and some permanence into these senior positions,” he said.

Cesa Deputy President Naren Bhojaram said that historically, the municipal engineer was a very highly regarded and respected member of the government, who had a lifetime career and a 20- to 30-year outlook. However, most municipal engineers were now given only five-year contracts.

The way in which the government had structured senior positions in local government and the respect given to these positions meant “no matter how much you pay them, nobody wants to do the job".

It also transpired that the number of engineers employed by the government has reduced by nearly two-thirds, while the population served has increased almost four-fold. Lötter said that before 1994, 5 100 engineers served 14 million people outside of the former homelands. Today, an estimated 1 800 engineers serve almost 47 million people.

The lack of technical management expertise, particularly in municipal and provincial government departments, is likely to be the single greatest stumbling block to sustainable development and growth, he said.

While the number of professional engineers in the public sector fell to around 15% from 40% in 1980, this decline was counter to the overall picture in the country. There has been an increase from 12 000 to 20 000 in the professional ranks of Cesa’s member firms.

Cesa, however, continued to assess that there were serious shortages of engineers, despite a strong growth in the number of university intakes and a steady growth in the number of professional engineers being registered.

Bhojaram stressed that the solution for the government did not lie necessarily in a mass employment campaign, noting that it required only a small cadre of engineers to ensure delivery.

“The South African National Roads Agency runs an institution of 169 employees, and if you look at what they execute in terms of propjects, it is an enormous amount of work, which is done extremely well because they have good procurement and partnership arrangements in place,” he said.

Among the crisis areas that were highlighted are:

·       Major assets could be lost entirely should the maintenance backlogs not be closed, indicating that the management of such assets requires a major overhaul. It costs R175 00 a kilometre to resurface a road, compared to R3 million to rebuild when it has gone to potholes. Similar scenarios held true for other infrastructure types found in energy, water and logistics milieus.

·      South Africa’s water demand is projected to exceed supply by 2025, with metropolitan areas such as the Witwatersrand to experience shortages from 2013. Water quality is deteriorating, and interventions are required to build, maintain and upgrade infrastructure and upskill staff.

·      In the wake of the recession, the government’s target of a R787-billion infrastructure investment programme covering energy, water and transport could now only be met if it were willing to take on additional debt. But for the market to lend to the country, without affecting its risk rating, it is vital that it shows credible control with effective management of infrastructure investment.

Elsewhere, at least 80 staff vacancies in highly skilled posts at the City of Cape Town’s utilities department, particularly in the waste water section, have been blamed for high E. coli counts and chronic water pollution at several city beaches. Waterways and rivers are being polluted by the waste water plant in the Cape Flats area.

A local city councillor warned that the city’s Blue Flag beaches risked losing their status because of the city’s poor management of waste water.

Three of four district manager positions in the waste water section of the city are vacant, while only one of three senior professional officer posts has been filled.

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