CESA responds to 2019 Budget Speech – promoting ‘Value for Money’ Procurement
While Consulting Engineers South Africa (CESA) supports the provisions of Minister Tito Mboweni’s 2019 Budget presented in his speech today, the organisation believes that Government needs to urgently revise its Procurement Practices for Consulting Engineering Services related to the development of Infrastructure, ensuring proivision of ‘Value for Money’ infrastructure that is safe and durable.
CESA CEO, Chris Campbell, states: “We would like Government to focus on ‘Value for Money’ when procuring the services of consulting engineering firms. We know we have less money available for infrastructure and we need to ensure we get “more long-term bang for our buck”.
The problem often lies between the Client, who provides poor scope definition and seeks out the least cost professional service providers and the Professional Service Providers, aggressively underpricing their services simply to secure the project and compromising their ability to manage the design and construction supervision to provide quality services whilst managing the construction process to minimise cost overruns and time delays.
Open tendering for such professional services and the expectation from public sector clients for fees to be discounted exacerbates this problem.
Consulting contributes 3% to the costs of developing an infrastructure asset over 3 years, Construction contributes up to 30% of these costs over say another 3 years, then the asset owner is left to manage operations and maintenance for the remaining 25 years, costing potentially 67% of the asset cost of ownership.
A Consulting Engineering company providing quality professional services at 3% will be able to assist in reducing cost in the downstream phases whilst ensuring sustainability of the infrastructure.
Although CESA is in full support of competitive service provisioning, they believe that firms should not take on work for which they are not able to deliver quality professional services as this compromises the integrity of the industry and places the public at risk.
For Government to ensure that South Africans receive ‘Value for Money’ the personnel procuring professional services need to be technically competent to do so.
“Following on from the State of the Nation address it is heartening that technical competence in Government will be increased and that infrastructure promotion will be driven further through the Infrastructure Fund. These are positive steps that CESA supports and is willing to become active participants in,” states Neresh Pather, CESA President.
CESA’s theme for 2019 includes Delivering Purpose and Engagement – Establishing Trust and there is a strong focus within CESA on working with and supporting Government, with increased collaboration with National Treasury on Procurement, the Auditor General’s office on compliance support, together with partnering agreements with Client Bodies like SANRAL, Transnet and COGTA allowing CESA.
More information from Bonolo Nkgodi, Tel: 011 463 2022 /
Bonolo@cesa.co.za
