by Ian Massey
MDA Consulting Director
www.mdaconsulting.co.za
“Industry more comfortable with
conflict than collaboration”
don’t trust the contractors to agree to a
fair deal for the workforce? Such project
labour agreements have had disastrous
consequences, with contractor’s man-
agement being undermined.
A second development is the pro-
posed CIDB Prompt Payment Act due
to be passed into law shortly. Smaller
contractors will benefit from the
requirement that subcontractors must
get paid timeously (paid-when-paid
clauses will be banned) as well as the
requirement for real-time resolution of
disputes via adjudication.
Local community involvement has
caused disruption on a number of
contracts and cost contractors millions of
Rand to secure their site.
Possible Game Changers
Following the findings of collusion, a
voluntary rebuild programme has been
agreed between the country’s top seven
construction groups and Government. In
terms of the agreement, large chunks
of the companies will be sold to black-
owned entities. Alternatively, black-owned
enterprises will be mentored to develop
Polarisation
their skills and increase their turnover
ten-fold by 2024.
While some industry commentators
indicate that the programme addresses
transformation at the same time
as imposing punitive sanctions on
collusive companies, the problem with
achieving transformation by growing
mentored black owned entities is that
it requires that work be made available.
You can only grow competition if there is
work available.
The alternative is that the mentor
organisation must shrink to allow the
mentored company to grow.
In my view, ownership is not the issue.
Listed companies already have relatively
high BEE ratings. What it boils down to is
opportunity and participation across the
board, not ownership. A more inclusive
arrangement relies on the availability of
skills, education, training and experience,
which is in short supply.
communication, contractors have to be
more careful who they do work for.
As an industry, we also need to look
at the implementation strategy that has
been adopted, analyse the outcome of
our contracts and decide whether the
implementation strategy worked.
An excessively adversarial model
does not provide a workable platform for
the achievement of successful contract
outcomes. We need to move away from
adversarial contract implementation
strategies and adopt a collaborative
approach, which requires a new culture.
We need to transform our cultures to
align with the other parties to the contract,
for the overall good of the contract,
rather than putting our own interests
ahead of the other stakeholders. This
requires strong leadership and the re-
establishment of trust.
Looking Forward – Dealing
with Polarisation
In a dysfunctional environment which mani-
fests in a lack of trust and a breakdown in
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