Govt calls for resilient,quality infrastructure

M

inistry of Transport and Public Works Principal Secretary for administration Madalo Nyambose has called on stakeholders in the construction industry to prioritise resilience and quality of infrastructure.

She said this on Thursday in Blantyre when she opened a Fourth Construction Sector Joint Consultative Group Meeting under the theme: ‘Incorporating climate, resilience in planning, design and implementation of infrastructure projects’.

Nyambose said it is high time the industry learnt from the past experience of cyclones that have been causing devastation to infrastructure.

She said: “The thematic message is that let’s think resilience and let’s think quality because the experience that we have had with cyclones

“With the experience of Cyclone Freddy, various stakeholders attending this meeting are showing commitment to ensuring that implementation is done and resilience is looked into in our plan and designs and follow up with information dissemination.”

National Construction Industry Council chief executive officer Engineer Gerald Khonje said they organised the stakeholder meeting to come up with solutions to challenges of quality infrastructure.

He said the council believes that challenges facing the construction sector can be addressed by being proactive in terms of planning, design and implement infrastructure that is of quality.

Said Khonje: “We can isolate some of the infrastructure that have been done very well, but we also have a number of projects that have not been done well.

“There are challenges in terms of quality for various reasons and let me say that quality is a product of many things. One of them is how you have budgeted for that particular infrastructure.”

He said the council has developed infrastructure delivery management standards which will guide stakeholders in terms of how to conceive an infrastructure project, how to plan for a project, how to procure it, how to implement, how to manage it as well maintaining it.

“We believe that along that value chain if anything goes wrong at any stages, it results into poor infrastructure.

“Some of the infrastructures are termed poor because they were poorly conceived, poorly designed,” said Khonje.

He also bemoaned corruption in the construction sector that has affected the overall quality of infrastructure. n