Construction & Engineering News South Africa

Desperately needed registered engineers can't find work in SA

The South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) CEO, Manglin Pillay says that spending trillions of rands in infrastructure, including R840bn by the end of next year, is not going to happen any time soon, BDLive reports. The government, he says, simply does not have the capacity.
Desperately needed registered engineers can't find work in SA

"There's a call from the departments of public works and local government to employ professionally registered engineers, but civil servants are still using unregistered engineers. They're hiring unqualified people to do technical work."

Ministers of departments like finance, public works, local government and economic development have acknowledged the need to improve capacity by bringing technically qualified people back into the system to help with the roll-out of infrastructure programmes. "The problem is still that things are handled by inappropriately qualified people who don't know what they're doing," Pillay tells BDLive. As a result, people without appropriate skills are adjudicating lucrative tenders. Tendering processes are flawed and engineering companies lose millions of rands tendering for projects that are shelved or given to ridiculously unqualified competitors.

Read the full article on www.bdlive.co.za.

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