Private-sector expertise and finance should be leveraged to help reinvigorate South Africa’s underperforming infrastructure programmes, Consulting Engineers South Africa (Cesa) argues, adding that the accelerated deployment of energy, transport and water projects will be essential to stimulating much-needed growth and job creation.

In his yearly presidential address, Cesa president Abe Thela highlighted the fact that South Africa’s investment spending, at 22.9% of gross domestic product, remained well below the 30% target outlined in the National Development Plan.

The plan, which is premised on eliminating income poverty and reducing inequality by 2030, primarily by raising employment levels from 13-million in 2010 to 24-million jobs by 2030, also emphasised the central role of infrastructure investment in laying the basis for yearly growth of more than 5% – at present the South African economy is growing at closer to 1.5%.

“The use of public–private partnerships (PPPs) in the financing, design, building and operation of infrastructure has emerged as the most important model employed by governments around the world to close the infrastructure gap. “[But] South Africa has not yet realised the full potential of this model of infrastructure delivery,” Thela lamented.

Cesa saw major opportunities for the PPP model in delivering both economic infrastructure, such as energy, transportation and water, as well as social infrastructure, such as educational and healthcare facilities.

Thela pointed to the recent success of the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme as an example of what could be achieved and argued that the PPP model could be critical in maintaining the “momentum” in the current context where government was facing serious financial constraints.

But acting CEO Wally Mayne warned that, the pipeline of both conventional and PPP projects would continue to underperform, unless government took steps to bolster technical capacity across all three spheres of government.

He held up the erosion of government’s technical skills base over the past number of years to be the main constraint to the realisation of the country’s infrastructure ambitions, despite a broad-based acceptance of its growth and employment multipliers, of 1.2% and 8.8% respectively.

“You need technical managers on the public-sector client side to manage consulting engineering projects. “We are confident that our members are full of integrity, honest, competent . . . but you do need a matching skill on the client side to explain to the politicians of the implications of not proceeding with projects,” Mayne argued. “Cesa has the backing of more than 500 member companies.

Cesa also remained deeply concerned about the continued use by the public sector of price-linked competitive bidding to appoint consulting engineers, arguing that it was leading to destructive discounting that was eroding the quality of work delivered and leaving little margin to enable experienced consultants to use the projects to mentor young engineers.

Thela said that it was encouraged by the National Treasury’s recently published supply chain management review, which appeared to address a number of the problems Cesa had with the current procurement framework. However, it would still like to see quality introduced as a key criteria in the selection of engineering consultants.

“You don’t see doctors bidding for an operation and you don’t see politicians calling for bids when they go to a doctor. “So why are we calling for bids for consulting engineering, where it is all about the quality of the consultant?” Mayne asked, stressing that the projects Cesa members were working on were generally critical to public safety.

“Competitive bidding is actually destroying our sector . . . we need to be paying a fair price for a piece of work,” he concluded.