Thank you, MC. And thank you Mr. President and your executive team for entrusting me with the responsibility of sharing my thoughts with your colleagues and guests.
I have been asked to speak on the role of engineers in post-pandemic recovery.
To answer this question, I am going to detour into some history, ancient and recent. Then I will talk about the present just so all of us remember what year and month it is. And then I will talk about the future.
I will talk about the future not so we may engage in dreamy discourse about 4IR and floating high-tech cities on one or other side of Lanseria Airport. Instead, I will talk about the future in the context of a direct challenge to everyone sitting here today, talking about engineering.
In preparation for tonight, I took to the internet to look for the three answers on the question: What is the purpose of engineering? The answers that came up did not disappoint.
In some ways they were typical of scientific language and culture.
The first one: Today, engineers apply both well-established scientific principles and cutting-edge innovations in order to design, build, improve, operate and maintain complex devices, structures, systems and processes.
The second one: Engineering is the application of science. In other words, its purpose is to convert scientific laws into applied reality.
The third resonated better with my understanding of how we should define the purpose of engineering or describe what it is. It said “Engineering and the development of new technologies are all about problem solving. Engineering involves applying scientific and mathematical knowledge to design and operate objects, systems, and processes to help us solve problems or reach goals. These processes often involve developing new technologies.”
So, what was my own understanding and description of engineering, as a layman who can’t even operate a modern scientific calculator in full? In my view, the purpose of engineering is to design and implement modern technological solutions to society’s most difficult problems so that humanity may advance, modernize, and prosper.
In this definition, I exclude those who use engineering for the purposes of wars of aggression rather than defence, or to produce chemicals used specifically for killing. In other words, as outstanding as war engineering often is, I exclude it from what I believe should be a positive moral purpose of engineering.
History
Just in case we take the contribution of engineering to human progress, let us consider some of the world’s most important innovations that have changed the face of humanity and the world.
The printing press enabled the amplification and distribution of literacy and knowledge – books, not just scrolls. This is not to say that engineering advances do not create obsoletion, they do. In fact, before engineers designed a way of recording and replicating recorded music for sale, every village singer was making a decent living.
Today, why must anyone listen to an off-key singer at a party when a DJ can play music from various globally renowned artists across the world? The young people would most likely heckle or throw cooldrink cans at them.
Electric light made enormous social and technological change possible. It improved productivity and made the day literally stretch longer. I should know, try doing something, anything in the villages at night. It’s pitch black.
By the way, when you want to consider one of the ways you can see Africa remains poor, think of the vast expanse of this continent that still, in 2022, does not have access to electric light. Images from space will show you exactly where the concentrations of electric light are and the coincidence of that with social and economic progress.
Then there was the telephone! I don’t know how many people here remember when access to telephony was limited but when I went to boarding school for the first time, we still had to write letters home. And then you waited for a response letter, which sometimes arrived just after you went home for the school holidays.
Of course, some fellows wrote themselves love letters and claimed they were from girlfriends so they could earn some clout in the dorm.
Time crawled then – getting things done was super super-slow. Today, people complain about being blue ticked on WhatsApp because you opened a message while doing something else. In other words, it has accelerated the rate at which we do and expect things, and therefore the number of things we are able to get done. Productivity!
But I now want to come back to the present – to earlier this week, in fact.
On Monday, 25 July, President Ramaphosa made a televised address to South Africans regarding the electricity crisis that has been raging for 14yrs. Before I touch on what he said, let me remind you how we got here.
First, there was a government decision to NOT build new power stations despite the experts at Eskom saying we should. The profit that would otherwise have been used for that task was sent back to the National Treasury for use in other government purposes. That political decision, yes, government is a political institution, is what initiated the crisis.
Then there was a decision to build new power stations, Medupi and Kusile, among others. Once again, the politics conspired to produce an environment in which both projects took far longer, and cost much more than they should have. That was because corruption, enabled and driven by politicians and their accomplices in the private sector, interfered in the operations of Eskom.
Last Monday’s address by the president during which he announced several changes to the regulations governing the granting of renewable energy procurement was another political act. These measures could have been taken last year, the year before or five years ago. Not taking such decisions was equally political, a failure of politics in other words.
In the United States of America, Senators Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin announced a $369bn climate change budget proposal that will have a profound impact on the projects that unfold over the next decade, enabling engineers to innovate and begin to change the face of the US economy and that country’s carbon footprint.
What I mean is that the role of engineers in any scenario is often, fundamentally driven by those who have the shrewdness to want to engineer a different future. These are men and women involved in politics. They decide what the future must be like and how the rules to get to that future must work. When they get it wrong, there is usually little or nothing engineers can do.
The case for South Africa
I want to argue tonight that the case of what we should commission engineers to do in South Africa right now goes beyond the pandemic because there is a pre-existing deficit of investment in several strategic areas.
The most important is electricity. Yes, loadshedding is a big factor but how one formulates the need determines the scope and impact of the work done. For instance, ahead of the 2014 elections, Eskom was asked to keep the lights on at all costs. The unsaid part of that injunction was that this was intended to save the ANC from electoral embarrassment that year.
Eskom kept the lights on but did far less maintenance than they should have. No, I am not speculating. This was told to me first hand by a former Eskom Chief Executive Officer in a long conversation that was so shocking I was rooted to my chair when he got up to shake my hand and leave.
We should frame our electricity challenge in this way: South Africa must design and implement such policy as may be necessary to ensure the long-term availability of increasingly clean and affordable electricity to underpin our efforts to build a growing and inclusive economy. We must do this by putting in place a set of rules that rapidly unlock public and private investment, ensure fair competition, and reduce environmental harm over the next decade.
Within ten years, South Africa must transform from an electricity-starved country to reliable supply with a growing renewable energy hardware and services industry that powers similar growth in various parts of the African continent.
There are many areas in which I could reframe the objective in similar terms, but I have chosen electricity because it is so fundamental and immediate. There really is very little point in pontificating about all the great things we could do when we are battling to keep the lights on.
The point I want to make here is that the question of what engineers should do in this moment is not for engineers to answer, but for policymakers. It is very important that we do not exist in a bubble where we assume things are normal in our country. They are not.
The quality of the political and policy decision making does not match the skill and experience sitting in this room. We must reflect on what is necessary to change that picture because it is untenable. It will result in you inviting another person next time to talk about how you can change a country you have no power to influence to any significant degree unless you take a conscious decision to do so in an organized and concerted fashion.
Let me quote Bertrand Russell, one of my favourite European philosophers. In his essay, Authority and the Individual, he said:
“The men of science, in spite of their profound influence upon modern life, are in some ways less powerful than the politicians. Politicians in our day are far more influential than they were at any former period in human history. Their relation to the men of science is like that of a magician in the Arabian Nights to a djinn who obeys his orders. The djinn does astounding things which the magician, without his help, could not do, but he does them only because he is told to do them, not because of any impulse in himself.”
The politician, when he is successful, is subject to no such coercion. Let me ask: What does the djinn end up doing when the magician is extremely poor at his craft?
Engineers are people of science. Effective policy design and implementation need to be scientifically informed, which requires an engineering profession with enormous political clout. I wonder if, sitting here, you consider your profession to enjoy the necessary influence on the way policy is formulated in our country.
In his other treatise, The Scientific Outlook – Bertrand Russell says:
“A scientific opinion is one in which there is some reason to believe true; an unscientific opinion is one which is held for some reason other than its probable truth.”
It is my hope that, in seeking to add political influence to your strategic objectives, you hold what is scientifically true very close, otherwise you may, as we have seen in the past, once more end up with engineers who do more damage by slavishly assimilating the weaknesses of people who are more attached to sentiments than evidence.
And this happens. Russell continues:
He also says: “If you number among your acquaintances some eminent man of science, accustomed to the minutest quantitative precision in his experiments and the most abstruse skill in his inference from them, you will be able to make him the subject of a little experiment which is likely to be by no means unilluminating. If you tackle him on party politics, theology, income tax, house-agents, the bumptiousness of the working-classes and other topics of a like nature, you are pretty sure, before long, to provoke an explosion, and to hear him expressing wholly untested opinions with a dogmatism which he would never display in regard to the well-founded results of his laboratory experiments.
As this illustration shows, the scientific attitude is in some degree unnatural to man; the majority of our opinions opinions are wish-fulfilments, like dreams in the Freudian theory. The mind of the most rational among us may be compared to a stormy ocean of passionate convictions based upon desire, upon which float perilously a few tiny boats carrying a cargo of scientifically tested beliefs.
And so let us go back to Eskom, for instance. Men and women of politics who believed for some reason other than scientific truth, that we need not build additional power generation – carried the day and instructed engineers and scientists to stand down. This invited a crisis we will take a very, very long time to get out of, if we do get out of it at all.
Societies function when there is a careful blend of men and women with two key characteristics – a desire for power to change the lives of its people for the better, and a commitment to facts and science to achieve transformative, positive outcomes.
In our country we have recently elevated men and women of only one kind – a desire for power and glory for their own sake, where the transformative outcomes they have produced have merely been the inevitable by-product rather than a conscious effort to move South Africa forward.
Here is my view of how you should understand your role at this time:
First, recognize that the politics is broken and dysfunctional – that is why key institutions don’t work as they should. Unless we fix that problem, very little else will work. Fixing that problem is a civic duty, not a professional responsibility. It needs all of us.
Second, it is necessary to be organized – and luckily, the NSBE is already an organization with clear objectives. My specific challenge is that you think very carefully about how you should frame your strategic objective to influence policy. If you only get involved AFTER the politicians have decided on what should be done, you need to change your game plan.
The politicians should rely on you to frame their thinking, especially as black engineers who come from rural communities that, in terms of infrastructure availability, may as well be existing in 1978. I know and appreciate that you want to promote the success of black engineers, but this must be done with our socioeconomic context in mind and needs to go beyond career and business advancement.
At the Rivonia Circle we have an over-arching project called South Africa 2.0. We believe South Africa is overdue for a fundamental reset, a reorientation of how we understand and pursue the development and modernization of our political institutions, the economy and society.
We do not believe it is possible to change one sector or aspect of our society while others decline. To move South Africa forward, we need political and state institutions, political and state actors that share the same vision, outlook, and commitment to method. It is not possible to generate momentum when various forces are pushing in different directions.
This is called consensus.
We are in the phase of ideation and framing and will very soon move to research and development. If any of you are interested, our doors are open. The reason we are doing this is that it is simply unprofitable to the people of this country for the multitudes of sectors and organizations to keep making representations to people who have neither the inclination nor capacity to listen, let alone do what needs to be done.
Transformative national outcomes do not happen in a vacuum or by chance. They are crafted and pursued over a very long time by a community of people who, within the different sectors, share a clear vision and a clear purpose.
I wish the NSBE all the best in its work, and challenge you to chase a higher ideal, to actually shape the destiny of South Africa, not just the engineering profession or just the lot of black engineers.
Thank you.
