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, even though I am not an engineer in the literal sense. 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 '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 artefacts 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 endeavour. Its principles have changed humanity's approaches in the fields of food production and processing, energy generation and application, medical sciences and the re-engineering of human ailments, biomedical engineering, information engineering, including Big Data engineering, and many others that I may not have 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 of wisdom: he said

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

He went further to say that all wealth created by humanity is based on meeting human demand for these elements, in their individual or recombined forms. It is the various bonds these elements form that create life for humanity. This department is itself about 2 Hydrogen molecules and Oxygen, and of course, the outcomes of what we have consumed, which is 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 say that your role should be directed, if not redirected, at the economy itself. To that end, I will address you on the role of the NSBE and the engineering profession in economic transformation. Whether that transformation is gradual, reformatory, or radical, it is for you to put quantitative measures in place leading to that conclusion.

 

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

 

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 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 organisation. It is thus expected to help the country with an engineering imagination whose historical originative context addresses what is internal to the challenges of blacks.

 

   Infrastructure development hinges on overcoming resource and policy barriers; NSBE can play a pivotal role by advocating for supportive policies and mobilising resources to realise South Africa's engineering potential.

 

It is still mind-boggling to understand how South Africa has become such a massive engineering complex over the last 25 years, exemplified by projects like [specific project], which continue to impact communities and economic growth today.

 

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

 

We therefore still need to undertake an engineering journey to close the mechanisation gaps in our development trajectory. The NSBE should thus define the primacy of industrialisation and/or mechanisation.

 

4.     Our battles for land as a base capital resource might be legitimate in a political sense, but might be misplaced in economic capitalisation 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 instils in NSBE members a mindset that defines productivity in space-volume-to-food-tonnage ratios rather 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 similar funding.

 

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

 

In this department, there are engineering-intensive challenges that can create new industries, from which other engineering disciplines 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 their related impact on old pumps that do not have the latest relay devices to regulate the impact of power outages

 

3.     The Water hyacinth problem has impacted the inland fishing industries. The management of hyacinths requires engineering interventions that may yield cattle and animal feeds, turning the protein challenge into new opportunities. Hyacinth can open up new opportunities in the fertiliser market, especially when integrated with sludge at the bottom of dams that contain minerals from fish poo, 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 fishing for foreign investment, we should be preparing ourselves with projects. And by the way, your colleagues in ABSIP can be resourceful in developing financial instruments that require little to no FDI to implement and grow this economy. There are crowdfunding avenues that black engineers have never targeted as sources of funding for projects.

 

There are pension funds in South Africa that now have mandates to invest locally but lack bankable projects. There are financial services companies with venture equity funds that lack 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 for the bulk of what we produce by hand, we will not become globally competitive 

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

 

In my formative years, I was guided through a development process to study how professional associations such as the NSBE and Think Tanks propel the developed world to maintain its continued dominance in 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

·     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 stay in touch with the next generation of thinkers in every field, translating an imagined future 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 they were known.

·       They build stakeholder engagement platforms that interface with the policymaking world in a way that makes new development imaginations more predictable.

·       They have forced interdisciplinary engagements on the needs of other disciplines for the special disciplines in which they operate. 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