Water Affairs faces dire civil engineer shortage, says SAICE

Ideally, engineering teams should reflect the accepted international municipal and utility ratio of six engineering professionals per 100 000 inhabitants. However, in South Africa's best case scenario - larger cities and towns - municipalities had access to three engineering professionals for each 100 000 inhabitants.

"This is not nearly enough to address our country's service delivery needs, including water, sanitation and waste management. If allowed to continue, service delivery will all but come to a standstill," said South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) CEOManglin Pillay on Tuesday.

SAICE highlighted the dilemma the Department of Water Affairs (DWA) faced in terms of its civil engineering skills base.

SAICE fellow DrChris Herold said that in May this year, the DWA had only 31% of its complement of civil engineers - or 78 out of 250 funded posts. Also, 25% of these were aged between 60 and 64, which meant they would be retiring within the next five years -a loss which represented 44% of the chief engineers at the DWA.

Another worrying factor was that 24% of the top managers fell in the 55 to 59 age group.

Herold believed the long-term health of the DWA was seriously compromised, as there were only ten candidate engineers at the bottom end of the scale.

Between these candidate engineers and the top end there were only 20 engineers in production grade, representing an "enormous, gaping middle management gap" that would not be easy to fill.Training engineers at South Africa's tertiary institutions also presented a problem. According to SAICE data, at some institutions, of the around 1300 applications received, only about 400 applicants had the minimum requirement in maths and science, and only 20% of these could be accepted as first-year students, having appropriate symbols in these subjects.

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