I was at a site meeting the other day and was given some drawings that were supposed to be for approval by the engineer.

The drawings were rubbish. They had no title, no drawing number, no date, no revision number; they were not to scale, had no scale and had no dimensions.

Thus, at the site meeting, I prepared to tell the contractor all this, but the project manager and client brushed me aside. “Let’s work with what we’ve got,” said the project manager, virtuously. Well, since the drawings meant nothing and since the contractor had only emailed them two hours before the meeting, the meeting ended up in an open discussion on what would work and what would not work.

Some of the discussion was based on fact, some on opinion, some on preference. In general, it was a waste of time. It would have been so much better to insist that the contractor produce proper drawings which would have focused his thinking on what was needed. But I realised that the contractor probably could not read an engineering drawing. So, I do not know why they are even dealing with him.

Another mystery surfaced today. There are two big generator sets that have been installed near a school. Naturally, these sets have to comply with noise control regulations. Thus, we were given the job of making them quiet. Part of our design was to design a very fancy silencer, all of 3 330 mm long. Anyway, we went to the site for tests and found that the generator and silencer produced a very prominent low-frequency noise. We were very disturbed that our silencer was so bad. But we checked and found that the silencer was about 1 m shorter than it was designed. This has the effect of not eliminating certain low-frequency noises that have to be eliminated.

What has happened is that the generator supplier has just ignored our very detailed design and expected to get away with it. It is not going to happen.

Then something else happened the other week – we had designed the soundproofing for a building. We were called to the site by an angry architect and client, who said the soundproofing did not work. So we said, okay, let us look at it; give us a day or two. We sent a technician round and he came back with three A1 pages of items the contractor was supposed to do but had not done. So we gave these to the architect and said, see?

Then we had to meet the builder and explain all the items. Rather boot-faced, he said he did not understand why he was being asked to do all this ‘new stuff’ and who was going to pay. So we had to explain to him, drawing by drawing, item by item, where the drawings indicated what he had to do, which he had not done. We felt this was the architect’s problem but we just did it anyway.

Three weeks later, the architect said we could go and check on the builder’s work. Why we should be supervising the builder I did not know. But we did check and about ten items on the list were not done. So we asked the builder, could he read; what’s the problem? More boot-faced.

I think the problem is that the political climate in this country has created a culture whereby it hardly matters if you have the ability to do anything that the job actually requires. This creates a culture of institutional stupidity which, in turn, leads to the appointment of contractors who cannot do drawings, cannot read drawings and do the work in such a way that it is half finished.

Let me hasten to say that there is a number of small contractors who are absolutely excellent. But these are, inevitably, run by their owners. Their heads do not extend into the cloud of incompetence which comes down from government appointments. We need to change the leadership. I do not care which party gets the job. Changing the leadership to competent people will sooner or later lead to competent contractors. This is what is needed.