Heritage Day falls on 24 September, and most of the country will spend it around a fire with people they like. That is a good way to spend it. But there is a version of heritage that does not photograph well and almost never gets mentioned on the day: the knowledge that lives in people's hands, gets handed to the person next to them on site, and ends up cast into a structure that will still be standing long after everyone who built it has retired.
Unicon has been building in KwaZulu-Natal since Tony Nott started the company in 1991. Almost everything we have learned in that time sits in people rather than in documents. This is an attempt to say plainly how that actually works, because the industry has a habit of burying it under a phrase.
A Reservoir Either Holds Or It Does Not
Water-retaining concrete is the least forgiving work we do, and it is the clearest illustration of the point. The design can be correct, the mix design can be correct, the reinforcement can be placed exactly as drawn — and the wall can still weep. What decides it is how the shutter was braced, how the pour was sequenced, how the construction joint was prepared before the next lift, and how the concrete was looked after in its first week.
Every one of those is a judgement made by a person on site, usually in the moment, often in weather nobody would choose. No specification transfers that judgement. It comes from having done it before, and from having stood next to someone who had done it a hundred times and was willing to explain why.
That is also why a leaking structure is so expensive to argue about afterwards. The paperwork is usually in order. The workmanship is where it went.
Why We Employ Our Own
We directly employ our key artisans, foremen and machine operators, and we own our plant rather than renting it. That is normally explained in commercial terms: control over the programme, no third-party equipment waiting on a hire desk, no subcontractor gap in the middle of a pour. All of that is true.
The more important reason is quieter. Labour brought in for a single contract leaves at the end of it, and everything it learned leaves with it. The next contract starts from nothing and the client pays for that in defects and in time. When the crew is your own, the team that poured last season's reservoir walls is the team available for the next ones, and the standard is something you can actually repeat rather than something you re-teach from scratch every year.
Continuity is not a soft benefit. It is most of what separates a contractor who is consistent from one who is occasionally excellent.
What Skills Transfer Actually Looks Like
"Skills transfer" appears in nearly every tender document in South Africa, and it has been worn smooth by use. On a real site it is less impressive and more useful than the phrase suggests.
It looks like a general worker being put with the shutter hands rather than left on clean-up, because someone decided he was worth teaching. It looks like a foreman stopping to explain why a joint is being scabbled instead of simply telling someone to scabble it. It looks like an operator being given the machine on the easy sections first. It is repetitive, it is slow, it costs the foreman time he would rather spend elsewhere, and it is the only method anyone has ever found that works.
We source local labour on every site we run, and on rural sites that matters more than it does anywhere else. The people who live nearest the work are the ones who carry the skill afterwards, long after we have demobilised. We would also far rather promote than recruit — growing a good foreman into a site agent beats hiring a stranger into the role, because we already know how he behaves when something goes wrong at four in the afternoon.
Thirty-Five Years Of Different Work
The company did not begin with reservoirs. Through the 1990s it was rural clinics, schools, healthcare facilities and earthworks across KwaZulu-Natal. The 2000s brought larger commercial and institutional buildings, including the Invesco Shopping Centre and a series of big portal-frame structures. In 2010 we opened an in-house design office and began delivering design-and-build contracts under one responsibility. Heavy civils and bulk water grew out of that: river crossings, treatment works, pipelines, pump stations and 40ML-plus reservoirs.
Each of those eras needed a different mix of trades. What carried across was the people. The carpentry that braces a reservoir wall today is not far removed from the carpentry that framed a clinic roof in the 1990s, and the person who understands one is usually the person who taught the other. Thirty-five years is not a marketing number in this business — it is roughly one working lifetime, which is exactly how long it takes to hand a trade on twice.
The Part That Is Also A Business Case
None of this is charity, and it would be dishonest to present it that way. A Level 2 B-BBEE rating and 51% black ownership, CIDB 7CE and 7GB gradings — those are lines on a tender return, and they matter to clients on paper. What sits behind them is the same thing described above: people employed directly, trained on site, kept between contracts and promoted from inside.
Our ethos commits us to leaving communities stronger than we found them and to practical skill transfer on every site. That commitment is easier to keep when the people concerned are on your own payroll.
Today
So, to our site teams, our foremen, our plant operators, our subcontractors and the communities that have put people onto our sites for thirty-five years: a good Heritage Day. The structures are the record, and they were built by many hands.
If you want to see the work itself, the project database holds everything we have delivered since 1991. If you want to be part of building it, the careers page explains how we hire and what we look for — and it asks you to read the work first.