I recently noticed that I had suddenly become old. I had been quite happily moving along through my sixties when somebody mentioned that my brother was one year from being 70. This, of course, put me . . . well, it put me where I am.

It made me think that, in point of fact, quite a bit of time had passed since our first democratic elections took place. What may have been forgotten is that those first elections were not in any way smooth and simple running. Having decided to conduct elections in 1994, there was a considerable amount of to-ing and fro-ing as to how the elections would take place and what form and nature the incoming government would be. The party which used to be the Nationalist Party was still in power. Of the balance, which was everybody else, one of the leading officers, a youngster by the name of Cyril Ramaphosa, spent a great deal of time trying to stop the ex-Nationalists from dominating things as they wanted.

All this to-ing and fro-ing and back and forth had one fundamental effect on electrical equipment projects. They came to a grinding halt. In due course, there was an election and people were elected, but one thing that did not happen was any new projects or reconstructive work. People were too scared. They wanted there to be some indication of stability before going ahead with any new project.

Finally, in 1996, Old Mutual decided to go ahead and start a new project. Actually, it wasn’t new; it was the revamp of the Cavendish Square shopping centre. From the time negotiations on how elections would be conducted started until people came to the conclusion that the results of the elections weren’t going to be a massive bloodbath, almost six years had passed.

What no one bothered to note was that the ability of many of the traditional construction companies had changed shape or disappeared completely. Since it had taken six years for the whole thing to get going, the actual knowledge of how to manage large construction projects had faded. So, the new construction started. Old Mutual (I’m sure they will forgive me for telling people now) did not do a very good job. Within six months, the project was six months behind. The whole construction area was full of people who blamed other people for construction delays, budget overruns, and so on.

As is not uncommon in projects which don’t work out very well, the people who got blamed for many of the mistakes were the contractors. I was the consulting electrical engineer and I got blame directed at me and my subcontractors. Looking at how the electrical project was developing, it was a unique form of disaster; not only was nothing being built very quickly, but the client wanted stuff built as quickly as possible and cared less how much it would cost. Things were not made easier by the gathering of groups of up to 20 contractors and consulting engineers at a time, all suggesting how things should be done.

I could see that, electrically, there was only one way out; if I let the electrical contractor and the contracting staff continue on the path they had taken, disaster would surely follow.

I arranged a meeting with the electrical contractors involved and told them to do as little as possible and attend no formal meetings until, I, myself, instructed them to do so. I then just attended meeting after meeting until finally, sense prevailed and the project moved in the right direction, albeit a year late. I think I will be forgiven if I say that this means of project completion, when executed in a manner such as I’ve described, is relatively successful; no one wants to admit that the whole project nearly fell apart; no one dares to admit that it could all have been done better. Everybody is only too grateful that the project finished successfully (even if not on time).

I’s a truly successful project that’s still running after all these years.