I am in a substation. In the substation is some 11 000 V switchgear, a 400 V switchboard and two transformers. The room has no windows and no ventilation. I am with two others – one is the person who is responsible for the electrical design of the substation and the other is the client.

The client is a charming and attractive woman. She knows a lot about property deals and nothing about electricity. The person who is responsible for the electrical design was, until a few years back, an electrical draughtsperson but now, owing to the vagaries of black economic empowerment, is part of an electrical consulting practice. Nobody in the practice has any formal qualification of any worth.

However, for reasons of political correctness, expediency and sheer ignorance, the qualification-less consulting practice has been given the contract and competed the design and supervised the installation of all the electrical requirements of a large building. On the face of it, they have done an extraordinary job – the contractor has done all the work with no complaints about the design and finished the work on time. This is because the contractor, sensing the inabilities of the so-called consultants, has negotiated a fat contract that has allowed them to paper over all the woefully inadequate specifications of the consultant while taking the money in for vastly overpriced cables and lights.

But the contract has hit a snag. The municipal person who came to inspect the installation before it was switched on asked the so-called consultant for some information and became aware that the consultant and contractor had little idea of what they were doing . The client has called me in to inspect. I have made a list which, in part, reads: “Gas surge trip and alarm relays not connected to transformer, transformer temperature trip and alarm not connected, transformer not adequately earthed, IDMT relay not set; earth fault incorrectly set . . .”

I hand the list to the so-called consultant and the client. The so-called consultant tells the client that, on all their installations, they never connect the gas surge or temperature alarms. He says, mysteriously: “After all, the transformers are in the basement . . . ”

The client turns to me and says, are all these things really necessary? Yup, I say. Oh, she says, have you ever seen a transformer suffer this gas thingy? Yes, I say. Once. How many years ago? Oh . . . about 30 years ago, I say. Oh, she says, so there is a chance of one in 30 it will be needed? Let us not worry about it, she says. We leave the substation. To misquote James A Baldwin, I felt as if the bread I had cast upon the waters had floated back, poisoned.

I was called out to another site. Different client. This time the so-called consultant was not affirmatively appointed – he was on the job because he was cheap – given his glaring inability, it would be astonishing if he was paid more than a pittance. On site, he was trying to persuade his (and my) client to fit a new and expensive exhaust system to a newly installed diesel genset. The problem was that the set tripped in start-up, carrying full emergency load.

The so-called consultant had theories about exhaust back pressure and similar ideas. I did not agree. We called in the engine supplier, who hooked up his little computer to the set and found a box on the start-up menu which should have been ticked, but was not. Problem solved.

Now, in both these cases, the client was ill-served by incompetent people. In the case of the substation, if there is a fire resulting in damage or loss of life, the client will be charged, in an extreme case, with manslaughter. Whose fault is all this? Items 5 (5) and 5(6) of G3-74 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act clearly set out who should approve such designs. These regulations are routinely ignored. Whose fault is it? The Department of Labour? The Engineering Council of South Africa? Consulting Engineers South Africa? Or does making consultants tender for work cause them to cut corners? Something should be done, but who is to do it?