The National Society for Black Engineers will be in a
breakfast meeting with the Minister of Water Affairs and Sanitation on Friday,
18th June 2021. The breakfast provides an opportunity for the NSBE
to dialogue with the Minister, and potentially get a members-only response to
the ongoing tensions between Black Engineering professionals and the Ministry,
especially in the wake of the Cuban Engineers saga. As part of the advisory
complex to the NSBE leadership and practitioners therein, The thinc Foundation (th!nc)
has been invited to the Breakfast Meeting. We consider the breakfast meeting as the beginning of an epistemic departure point for Engineers of African origin.

In its analysis thinc dubbed the interaction with the
Minister to be about ‘Engineering for Economic Liberation’ (EEL).
Engineering for Economic Liberation should be, … 

…a clarion
call by Black Engineers, who are essentially Humans of African Origin, to claim
center stage in any post-COVID19 and/or post-conflict economic recovery of (South)
Africa by ‘turning the apartheid deficit into not only an economic opportunity’
but an opportunity to make Black Engineers the design, structure and implement
locus for such opportunities.

It should be a deliberate and programmatic call to implement the
NSBE-SA’s vison

‘To ensure
full participation of black engineers in the mainstream economy, wealth
creation and distribution.’

It should be the declared intent of the NSBE-SA to make the engineering
profession a strategic lead community of practice and ideation in all aspects
of development in South Africa. It should be alive to the truism that at the
center of any development and/or industrialization including innovation to leapfrog
societies, lies the ingenuity of engineers and thus the engineering profession.
Cognizant of the disempowering character of engineering education in certain of
the training institutions of South Africa, the NSBE-SA should endeavor to convert localities
created to perpetuate inequality into development complexes and engineering-led
food and other commodities production centers within which the chronically rolled-over funds of state
created finance institutions would find spending relevance.

NSBE-SA should, and in a transdisciplinary way, integrate
the whole of the engineering professions as index substrates to whole of state
planning initiatives envisaged in the National Spatial Planning Framework as a
base implementation template to make the National Development Planning mindset
of the State work. An immediate opportunity for this endeavor is to congregate
as engineers around the translation of the District Development Model into a
workable platform through which as engineers of African Origin, and thus
interior to the actual demands for development by African societies, they can
produce a series of integrated projects translating into a program towards the
economic recovery of South Africa.

If bureaucrats are the mind of the state, engineers should be the translators of that thinking into practical bricks and mortar, or nuts and bolts programs. It should be Engineers that answer the how to questions of the what should be statements of organs of state and private capital. The time for the convergence of South African Black Engineering ingenuity with the ‘rated’ ‘policy diarrhoea’ of the governing political elite has come. 

The breakfast meeting with the Minister of Water and
Sanitation, …

‘a
department that is arguably at the center of human settlement development, any water-based
industrialization, mining industry expansion, and/or any process by humanity
that would require water as a substrate for secondary and or tertiary
productive activities’, 

 …should be seen as
the epicenter for all other such meetings with engineering intensive organs of
state. The NSBE-SA should approach this meeting as not only a networking
opportunity, but a space within which relations with Departmental officials
will be converted into defined relationships through which interactions could
be transactions translatable into projects.

The meeting should be about setting a stage for the NSBE-SA
to recreate itself as an instrument of engineering led socio-economic
transformation. Integrating with like-minded professional institutions, more acutely in the financial services sector, the NSBE should create project resourcing instruments within the regulatory frameworks created for such,
particularly in the Public-Private Partnering space. This should be an effort
that galvanizes National Treasury as a financial instrument specialist organ of
state to create unsolicited ideation of tools create funding opportunities that
cannot be contaminated by the contested public tendering processes. This would be a
leadership leap the NSBE-SA should take with a spirit of creating opportunities
for engineering that are socially relevant and reducing the apartheid deficit,
as well as its templates of dominance.

In order to have impact, the NSBE should position to be custodians of the national engineering for economic recovery master plan. As government theorizes, the NSBE should be at the forefront of designing, structuring and implementing. 

About the Department of Water Affairs and Sanitation

As earlier argued, DWAS is one of the most engineering
intensive departments, it has a service delivery mandate so fundamental to
economic growth and improving the lives of all South Africans, that its
efficiencies should attract as equal an attention as health does. The scientific centrality of H2O in almost all chemical reactions and
processing to produce practically anything that humanity needs to live, makes
this Department a science, evidence and practice mecca for the engineering professions.

Like all other organs of state, DWAS is created within a
national firmament of ‘recognizing the injustices of the past’ and water is one
of the most acute injustices, given the growth in number of ‘water bucket
carrying women who are humans of African origin’ in rural South Africa, even
after the 1994 democratic breakthrough. What norms the public power carried by
DWAS as an organ of state is the Constitutional obligation to establish ‘a society based on
democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights’. 

The South
African Constitution intersperses socio-economic rights with other human
rights, on an equal level, thus anchoring the interdependence and
indivisibility of the different generation of rights.  In a service delivery sense, the Constitution
places an obligation on organs of state such as DWS to ‘respect, protect,
promote and fulfill the rights in the bill of rights’, and the constitution ‘binds DWS (and other entities such as NSBE-SA) as a natural or a juristic person’ in a
vertical and horizontal manner to ensure the fulfilment of the rights. This in essence makes the organized engineering
professions of South Africa, in this case the NSBE-SA, and organs of state
operating in contexts that procure engineering skills, to be bound by the
Constitution as partners in respecting, protecting, promoting and fulfilling
the rights in the bill of rights.

In lieu of the above obligations, the engineering profession
is by law, as the constitution obligates, to ensure that the human
rights on the environment; housing; and water security are respected, protected, promoted and fulfilled. Particularized in these rights is the securing of ‘ecologically sustainable development and use of natural resources while promoting justifiable economic and social development’, and having access to ‘sufficient food and water’.

The normative environment for partnerships with organs of
state on a human right governed platform is thus uncontested, save for the
opportunity not being taken advantage of. Besides these norms being enforced
through regulatory framework at their on-site operationalization, these norms
can be ‘hard enforced’ in courts of law, and ‘soft enforced’ through the Human
Rights Commission and/or stakeholder engagement and relations/relationship
regulating mechanisms such as the oncoming breakfast.

In more specific terms, DWS has a broad mandate, … 

‘to ensure
the provision of sustainable water and sanitation services’

In this mandate DWS, operates as a
catalyst to the economic recovery theme of

‘modernizing network industries to
promote competitiveness and inclusive growth, particularly water’. 

This thematic
area identifies water as suffering from infrastructure backlogs, this article characterizes
as ‘the apartheid deficit’. A deeper look into the recalibration of these network
industries shows an unbundling process that will result into (i) service
generation, (ii) service transmission, (iii) and household or beneficiary level
service distribution. This unbundling creates massive engineering opportunities
that may have been less conceptualized in an engineering context, and thus
require the NSBE-SA to close ranks with organs of state and define these. DWS
should surely be engaged in ideation processes on how to do the unbundling, and
the process might be in-influence by either than NSBE-SA engineers, an anomaly the breakfast outcomes should be addressing 

It cannot be normal for a society that is water challenged like South Africa, where Water Boards and Water producing SOEs are owed about R15bn by Municipalities that would otherwise not be able to repay to have an engineering community that is challenged with opportunity to ply its trade. 

It can also not be normal for a water resources challenged country to have a leaking infrastructure that wastes almost a fifth of its transmitted and distributed water whilst its engineering profession cries foul of lack of projects

It cannot be normal in a country that has chronic electricity load shedding to have engineering qualified humans of African origin that are unemployed

About other opportunities.

DWS mandate touches all other
mandates in the water security and food security sector. Innovations that are
in the food sector, including the 4IR induced mechanization that creates societal leap
frogging opportunities whose scalability would require engineering ingenuity
second to none. The inventor development programs in the Department of Science
and Technology as a sequel to programs such as the Gauteng Blue IQ Project and
related, including Film Studio Construction Sites managed by the Department of
Trade and Industry’s Film Project and many other innovations calls for Black
Engineers to ask the Question, why are we not in business? The opportunity to meet the Water
and Sanitation Minister should be a spearhead project.

There is a further need to meet the Ministries of Transport, Energy, Health, and all other engineering service challenged ministries. 

Conclusion

The BPI Foundation, a strategic
solidarity platform drawing from a wide skills base of Humans of African Origin
(HOAs), and physically and somewhat ideationally, hosted within ‘The th!nc
Foundation Complex’, is in a process of developing interventions through which South
Africa will be reclaimed and rebuilt through harnessing its productive capacity.
In this endeavor, the Complex will be collaborating with the engineering
profession in its newly reimagined self.

The Cereals with the Minister must
be engineered to bring the outcome of ‘TURNING APARTHEID DEFICITS INTO ENGINEERING
BASED ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES’. The challenge is set, we are waiting to listen,
hear, and heed to calls by Black Engineers on how to turn our country into a Global
Capital of Working Yellow Fleet and a space where Engineering and ICT converge
to advance the socio-economic plight of first Human South Africans of African
origin, and then proceed on wards into the continent and the Globe


References are available in original word document