This year is the twentieth year since I entered private practice as a con- sulting engineer.

My practice is in acoustics and electrical engineering. Running a consulting electrical engineering practice has never ceased to be hard. It seems that every single possible obstacle is placed in the way. Many practices relied on government work. This stopped in the 1990s owing to the collapse of the Department of Public Works.

Government, with its cadre deployment programme, sent many white public servants aged 55 on retirement, with benefits as if they were 65, to make way for black poli- tical appointees. Many had no idea how to execute many projects in the 1990s. The old-style Department of Public Works project manager was a steely-eyed tight-lipped hard man (yes, man), who could see through all the dodges, lies, dissemination and unofficial expenditure and the like and would, by virtue of being able to either authorise or refuse to authorise payments, rapidly bring everyone to heel and make sure buildings paid for by government were good buildings.

Not being politically connected or broad-based black economically empowered, I finally gave up trying to get work from government. I decided, well, I was pretty good at what I did and, rather than go to them, they would have to come to me. They did not.

Consequently, most of my work came from the private sector. Not in huge leaps, but it did come. Further, government and many industries started the practice of making consulting engineers bid on various projects. We would have to specify the services we were going to supply and indicate our fees. This led to (and still leads to) a situation whereby I, for example, despite having 34 years’ extensive experience in electrical and acoustics engineering, the fact that I can do a great design, can keep contractors in line and can save my client money to produce a durable design result which is really good, am required to offer my services in competition.

It is very much like asking a highly experienced dentist to take out your teeth at a price in competition with a dentist straight out of university. That is not the same person and they do not provide the same service. It might be just acceptable if I was offering my services in competition with people who were registered professional engineers. But often we offer our services in competition with people who are not registered as professional engineers and, in fact, are not engineers or have anything more than a qualification as a technician.

In Cape Town, there are firms which have no permanent engineers employed but continually do consulting engineering work. To its eternal discredit, the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA) has done abso- lutely nothing about this. Further, in 20 years, ECSA has done little more than make it harder for professional engineers to remain registered and for their status quo to persist. Even more annoying is the practice we have experienced very recently of writing out a whole scope of work for our services, including a price breakdown, only to have the project manager in one case (a former audio equipment salesperson) hand our offer to an unqualified person and ask that person to price it so that he gets the job.

These are the down sides. The upsides have been many. The design for the Cape Town International Airport acoustics cannot be taken from me or the people I now employ. We have, throughout the years, unlike many firms, religiously employed at least two students at Christmas time to show them how this engineering practice works. We are not selective in terms of the students we take for training, but we just take them on an application basis.

For this reason and, perhaps, because of persistence, most of my students have been black and they have all been with, with one exception, a pleasure to teach.

All in all it, has been worth it, but not financially – I am not going to retire early. It has been interesting. More interesting would be to see where engineering in this country, particularly consulting engineering, would go, if it had not been for government interference in the profession.