We try to stay away from politics in this column. But. Und zis iz a big ‘but’.

In South Africa, there are a number of civil engineering consulting practices which have had extensive experience in water treatment and storage. Wherever you go in the Cape, you will see small effluent treatment schemes which serve towns and small institutions. There are also large schemes. Effectively, South Africa has, to date, avoided the expedient of filtering sewage and then pumping it out to sea. We’ve done better than that. As it happens, I have been to many effluent treatments works, and, in the Western Cape, all are working. Not so in the Eastern Cape or other parts of the country. In these other parts, the water treatment works and effluent treatment schemes have fallen into disrepair, owing to the incompetence of the local municipalities. The municipalities have been staffed with “incompetent and unqualified” staff. At the Zondo Commission, Advocate Paul Pretorius stated: “As of February 15, 2021, there are currently a total of 9 477 senior managers employed in the public service. Out of those, 3 301 members don’t have the required qualifications.”

So, to fix the water treatment works and effluent treatment schemes, one would think that government would employ some of the South African consulting civil engineers. There are a few excellent ones. However, Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation Minister Lindiwe Sisulu says that, when she made a call for engineers in South Africa to come forward and have a working partnership with her department, only five companies responded. Apparently, this was not enough and so she has decided to import 24 Cuban engineers at a cost of R64-million to “mentor and transfer skills to municipal workers and also help repair South Africa’s ailing water infrastructure”. That, my bru, is a moer of a lot of mentoring.

Now, according to a 2006 report by the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba to the US President, there are only five wastewater plants in Cuba, and all of them are “inoperative”. They provide “some degree of treatment” to only 4% of the wastewater, the remainder being discharged without treatment. The word ‘discharged’ means out to sea (lucky crayfish). It happens that some 120 000 people in Havana are dependent on water tanker trucks because of low water levels in reservoirs. So, it is these 24 engineers who are going to solve our problems. The Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA), which regulates the engineering profession in the country, says Cuba is not a member of the International Engineering Alliance (IEA), a global organisation that governs the recognition of engineering educational qualifications and professional competence. Thus, there is some doubt as to whether the Cubans are, in fact, qualified to work here at all. (Not that they should worry. In Cape Town, there are a number of people who are not graduate engineers, not registered professional engineers, but who offer consulting engineering services and ECSA does nothing about it). The whole arrangement seems odd. It is, at best, a mistake by an uninformed Minister and, at worst, a means of sending money out of the country.

What the whole matter means is this: large civil engineering consulting practices are living in lean times, and large civil engineering consulting practices have the skills, and more than the skills required to sort out the water and sanitation services which government policies have messed up. These tax-paying civil engineering consulting practices have a basic right to be first in the queue for government work. A fee sum of R64-million would equate to projects totalling R1-billion, which would go a very long way towards fixing the water and sanitation services. But it’s all going off to a country where 94% of the collected wastewater is pumped out to sea. Ever since our Minister once told the country that she would arrange for the building of 20 000 houses in Cape Town in one year, I thought her somewhat misguided. Now, even more.