I am in a meeting in a council chamber at the City of Cape Town municipal premises. The subject of discussion is a report I wrote, which contains an analysis of whether the noise of aircraft leaving Cape Town International will affect the persons dwelling on the other side of the N2 highway in an adverse way.

Those living there are in an informal settlement. The question is whether the settlement should be developed by the City of Cape Town as a formal settlement. My report concludes that the noise is not an issue, provided the formal dwellings have adequate soundproofing. Others do not agree and have appealed the decision by the City to go ahead with the development. I will not dwell any further on the subject matter, as it is still in review. The process of the meeting is very formal. There is a chairperson and a timekeeper and we all have microphones which can be switched on or off. The appellants are given ten minutes to make their point. We then get ten minutes to respond. They get another ten minutes, as do we. The times are strictly controlled. During all this, I am somewhat awed by the process. We are deciding on the supply or not of formal housing to a large number of people in a series of ten-minute mini debates. It seems way too short to me. But I am told by a councillor that this is how it has to be. The City of Cape Town can only act on a series of decisions which have been ratified by a common vote at some level of government.

Can this be the best way? Let’s consider any large corporation. It will have a board of directors and a chairperson, a CEO, a COO, a CFO and various others. All will vote on various motions or ideas. In presenting the various motions, the reasons behind the motion will be clearly outlined by the relevant executive and then they will vote. All the board members will, generally, be quite expert in their fields. They won’t be on the board unless they are quite smart. But the City of Cape Town and other metros are not like that at all; the councillors running the city are elected by the people, in elections as we have just had. This does not make them wise and all knowing or expert at all. All they are is being better than somebody else at getting votes. The result is that any progress requires an inching forward through committee and subcommittee and appeals, all of which is time and money wasting. And then, when a decision is taken which does not suit a group of people who feel that their rights are being ignored, the matter goes to court, with a rapid progression from the High Court to the Constitutional Court. This is a huge waste of time.

In many ways, engineers are lucky. We cannot vote on the best way to pass current down a cable or build a highway or a water treatment works. Votes won’t help. There are laws that have to be obeyed and specifications to follow. Thus, the posturing that happens in council chambers can’t happen. One of the South African tragedies is that very few engineers ever make it to government or municipal positions. It is probably a lack of interest by the engineers, but the political parties often don’t make any effort to recruit engineers as councillors or Ministers. The result is that we hear ludicrous statements by politicians about how load- shedding can be simply solved, and housing needs can be met, among others, when very many of these proposals are hopelessly impractical. I doubt that we could change the way decisions are made at municipal level but I think having a group of engineers making suggestions and decisions would be much better than the current situation. And swifter. Cheaper too.