Talk on the role of the (Black) Engineering profession in (socio-) economic transformation of South Africa

In his poem, What Economy am I, a South African Poet writes,

My Produce feeds me less, and feeds others for less,

In my quest to feed self, I become a mess,

Policies about me are made far away from me,

My greatness is when others become greater,

What economy am I?

Let me thank the NSBE for the opportunity to speak about engineering when I am not an engineer in the literal sense of the word. I was asked to speak on ‘the role of the NSBE in the socio-economic transformation of South Africa’. In considering this request I asked myself the following questions

1.     Why the role of the NSBE and not engineering or engineers

2.     If it is the latter, what then is engineering? 

3.     Why socio-economic transformation and not economic transformation? 

 

I asked myself this question because I wanted to approach this topic like an engineer. You would agree with me that a 'good engineer 'is one that looks for a point of stability first, before any engineering design or work can be done’. I might bore you with ENG101 stuff but I must say this 'engineering is the profession aimed at modifying the natural environment, through the design, manufacture, and maintenance of artifacts and technological systems'.

 

It is in fact ‘the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings’. Its most common fields are, chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical. It has several sub-disciplines. Engineering is by nature a transdisciplinary endeavor. Its principles have changed humanity's approaches in the field of food production and processing, energy generation and application, medical sciences and human ailments re-engineering, biomedical engineering, information engineering including Big Data engineering, and many others that I may not have the time to mention.

 

With this said and done, I am reminded of one of the BPI advisory board members, Ntate Mashudu Ramano, on the BPI launch when he gave us this piece wisdom, he said

'everything that we use as humanity is traced to the elements in the periodic table'.

He went further to say all wealth created by humanity is based on meeting the demand of humans for these elements in their individual or recombined form. It is the various bonds that these elements make which create life for humanity. This department is itself about 2 Hydrogen molecules and Oxygen; and of course, the outcomes of what we have consumed once that has left us, otherwise called human waste.

 

If you really want to think about what makes property prices high besides the nostalgia around location, it is the cost and sophistication of getting water to where humans are, and how you manage sewer sludge. Otherwise, you include the cost of draining rainwater, walkways and human mobility management surfaces. 

I want to come to this matter of socio-economic transformation before I delve into the role of NSBE. Socio-economic is not economic, it is in fact a branch of economics. It focuses on variables whose attention might not result in economic transformation as we generally refer to. Let me not bore you with the academic debate but simply say, your role should be directed, if not redirected, at the economy itself. To that extent I will be addressing you on the role of the NSBE, the engineering profession, in economic transformation. Whether that transformation is gradual, reformatory or radical, it is for you to put quantitative measures leading to that conclusion.

 

I want to start by saying much of the world we saw, see and still to see is the sum of the imagination of humanity as translated into tangibles by engineering as a science of design, structuring and implementation. As humanity imagines, engineers create abstraction of those imaginations into a reality we call houses, infrastructure, machines and all that you as engineers deal with on a daily basis. Engineering is in this context a complex extension or projection of human faculties and activities. It reconciles the challenge of demand for services, time required to meet the demand, and the distance to be covered for the demand or need met. Engineers are at best our inventors and at worst translators of our inventions into reality. The travel into the minds of dreamers, arrive on the ground that these dreamers are standing on, and change those grounds into the reality they saw in the dreams of dreamers. 

 

Green fields change into cities because the engineering community saw sky scrapers when we saw grasslands, spaces become dams because engineers stopped water from its natural flow in order to redirect it to where rivers don't go,  landscapes and terrains get negotiated to create paths that connect communities in a form of roads to enhance human interaction from naturally remote areas, natural resources get transformed into energy forms to power humanity into a production capacity that can meet the population explosion related demand for more goods and services.

 

If the above and many others are the domain of engineering, what then is the role of the NSBE in the economic transformation of South Africa.

 

1.  The NSBE is a Black engineer formation and is thus expected to help the country with an engineering imagination whose historical-originative context addresses what is interior to challenges of blacks.

 

2.   Infrastructure development is in fact about the convergence of humanity's needs and engineering. The NSBE is expected to foreground the needs of South Africans in their engineering designs.

 

It is still mind boggling to understand why South Africa became such a massive engineering complex in the last 25 years and yet the impact and outcome of that engineering continues to gentrify parents and siblings of black engineers who were part of the design

 

3.   The NSBE is expected to redefine what should constitute our primary industries to mechanize and engineer around. South Africa had a dualist industrial revolution, on the one hand sections of its society went through the second and third industrial revolutions, and another, which is its majority, has not gone through those revolutions (ngisho thina). We were even interrupted in the first industrial revolution through land dispossession.

 

We therefore still need to go through an engineering journey that closes the mechanization gaps we have in our development trajectory. The NSBE should thus define that primacy of industrialization and/or mechanization.

 

4.     Our battles for land as a base capital resource might be legitimate in a political sense but might be misplaced in economic capitalization terms, unless it is a property ownership with space ownership ego returns. If it is about societal productivity, the advent of vertical farms and hydroponic farming as an engineering sub-discipline procures from NSBE members a mindset that defines productivity in space volume to food tonnage ratios than land area to tonnage production ratios.

 

5. The explosion of urban farming anchored on unused, or stranded concrete jungle structures redefines the engineering landscape, and calls for the NSBE to go on a design revolution that will translate the chronically rolled over funds at the IDC, DBSA, and such like funding.

 

6.   Let me cite this example, the world has a protein problem. There are precision protein production methods whose basic infrastructure requirements needs engineering skills to unlock the potential of our land and space resources. I was in Hong Kong the other day, I saw sky scrappers being build to house pig farms, cattle feedlots, and chicken farms. I have also seen food being processed to scale without reducing nutritional value.

 

In respect of this department, there are engineering demanding challenges that can create new industries with which other disciplines of engineering could be spawned.

 

1. Water leakages that are a manifestation of systemic problems in local government create opportunities for a convergence of ICT enabled leakage tracking systems. Their manufacturing would require engineering prowess.

 

2.     Water and sewer pumping gaps caused by load shedding and it related impact on old pumps that do not have latest relay devices to regulate the impact of power outages

 

3.     The Water hyacinth problem that has impacted on inland fishing industries. The management of hyacinths requires engineering interventions that may yield cattle and animal feeds with which the protein challenge could be turned into new opportunities. Hyacinth can open up new opportunities in the fertilizer market, especially when integrated with sludge at the bottom of dams that has minerals from fish poo which is a plant nutrient of note.

 

Free Style on opportunities 

 

The NSBE can therefore remodel itself as the leading platform to reimagine our economic recovery. Whilst our government is foreign investment fishing, we should be readying ourselves with projects. And by the way, you colleagues in ABSIP can be resourceful in the development of financial instruments that require less to no FDI to implement and grow this economy. There are crowd funding avenues never targeted by black engineers as sources of funding projects

 

There are pension funds in South Africa who now have mandates to invest locally, but do not have bankable projects. There are financial services companies that have venture equity funds that do not have bankable projects, and yet we have these bright men and women of African origin.

 

Let me leave you with these three challenges, 

 

1.     Until we come up with a processed version of our staple foods, we are not yet industrialising

2.     Unless we mechanise and come up with a machine based production process of the bulk of what we produce by hand we are not becoming globally competitive 

3.     Unless we commercialise products emanating from our indigenous knowledge systems we are still stuck to the time they were first produced

 

In my formative stages, I was taken through a development process to go and study how professional associations such as the NSBE and Thinc Tanks propel the developed world to have a continued dominance on the world economy. I have found out that this is what those societies are doing,

 

·       They invest in practical research and development, and record their findings as evidence of what works

·       The establish knowledge translation tools such as newsletters and journals through which data and information can be repeatedly used

·       They have established a process to always be in touch with the next generation of thinkers in every field to translate  a future imagined into a present lived, either as a model of scaled reality.

·       They have established linkages between the practice world and the theoretical world in ways that redefine work and practice as it was known.

·       The build stakeholder engagement platforms that interface with the policy making world in a manner that makes new development imaginations predictable.

·       They have forced interdisciplinary engagements on needs of other disciplines for the special disciplines they operate in. This is translated into a community of practice knowledge of the future

·       They are national in innovation and global in where the innovation can go.

 

THE NSBE should thus engage in a process to be exactly that for the engineering profession.

 

Thank you