Cut the Chaff

Can we afford this waste?

When it comes to project management, Malawi may wish to learn from how Egypt managed to construct the New Suez Canal—the latest artificial sea-level waterway that has become the pride of the Pharaoh descendants.

“This is Egypt’s gift to the world. We promised and we delivered,” Admiral Mohab Mameesh, the retired commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Navy and chairperson of the State-owned Suez Canal Authority  told USA Today last year after the launch of the canal that connects the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, providing the shortest sea link between Asia and Europe.

Egypt built the 35-km long canal in just one year instead of the three years that engineers projected to be the ideal time to finish the job.

The old 164-km long Suez Canal—built around 147 years ago—took more than 10 years to finalise.

So, how did Egypt pull-off such a mammoth project using local funds when Malawi can take as long as 10 years to complete a 50-km road with ready funding?

The answer lies in strong political will as well as clear-eyed and decisive leadership that know what it wants and how to get it.

I had a chat with Admiral Mameesh when I visited the Suez Canal Authority as part of a group of African journalists who visited that country in May this year.

He told me that at the launch of the project in August 2014, he was explaining to the audience that included Egyptian president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, that construction of the project would take three years.

“Then I saw the president shaking his head and raising one finger while mattering ‘one year’. I then realised that he wanted us to complete construction within one year. I said, ‘consider it done, Sir’. And that was it. I and my engineers went back to the drawing board and reworked our work breakdown structure to squeeze everything in 12 months.”

Exactly one year later, Admiral Mohab Mameesh and his team delivered an $8 billion asset that is set to double the number of vessels passing through Egypt and is expected to nearly triple revenue from the Suez Canal to $13 billion annually.

What is more—the money that financed the project was locally generated mostly through State issued bonds.

For a country that emerged from political turmoil just a year earlier, the project helped to unite Egypt towards a common purpose and reminded the citizenry of who they are and what they can achieve with relative political stability.

It is that kind of discipline to adhere to deadlines and budgets that is lacking in Malawi.

Thus, we have construction of hospitals such as Nkhata Bay District that get to be not only several years behind schedule when they finally open, but have budget overruns and lacking some of the facilities as specified in bills of quantity.

There are several roads from Nsanje to Chitipa that have remained incomplete for years for reasons as petty as lack of allowances.

Sometimes it is downright incompetence, but most of the times it is lack of leadership—with leaders taking their eyes off the ball for far too long while failing to put systems and a culture that results in officials working to achieve results for the greater public good.

This is why I hope that the launch of the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST)—championed by Vice President Saulos Chilima to ensure that construction of public infrastructure is more efficient and transparent—should achieve more than just publication and dissemination of periodic reports.

Instead, government should draw and use lessons from these reports to improve on project management because the billions of kwachas lost through the inefficiencies and laziness in the system can be put to better uses than is the case at the moment.  n

 

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