Municipal elections are coming, and for a contractor that means one thing: in a few months a number of the people who sign our payment certificates will be different people. The committee that approves a variation will have new members on it. The councillor who fields the complaints about a pipeline trench across a footpath may be somebody else entirely.
What does not change is the specification. Or the rainy season. Or the fact that a community at the end of a gravel road still needs the water to arrive.
We have been doing municipal and provincial work in KwaZulu-Natal since 1991, which means we have now built through every round of local government elections since the first one. It is worth setting out what that has actually taught us, because the honest version is less dramatic than the version a marketing department would write.
A School At Msinga Top
In 1993 and 1994 we built Mawele High School at Msinga Top: new classroom blocks, a hall, and the renovation of the existing buildings. Our record lists the employer as KZN Public Works and the contract as JBCC Series 3, in the under-R5-million band. It took twelve months.
The official opening came afterwards, and President Nelson Mandela performed it. The press reported the school as part of the Presidential Lead Project, with South African Breweries contributing over two million rand towards a school at Msinga Top. Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi was there and, in the newspaper's account, thanked the President for the project and spoke about reconciliation and working together. So was the Premier of KwaZulu-Natal, and so were the mayor and councillors from the surrounding area.
That last detail is the one worth sitting with during an election season. The local councillors standing in that photograph held exactly the office that is now up for a vote.
Mandela used the occasion to say that the community had put the school up "out of nothing", and to tell the children and the community that it was now up to them to look after it and make it work. That is a reasonable description of what public infrastructure actually is: something built once, by people who then leave, and lived with for decades by people who stay.
We Were Already There, And We Kept Going Back
Mawele was not our introduction to that part of the province. The very first entry in our project database — February 1991, the year the company started — is a clinic at Tugela Ferry. The school followed two years later.
Then, for a long stretch, the work in that district was water. Four phases of the Makhabeleni water scheme for uThukela Water between 2003 and 2004. The Makhabeleni water treatment works upgrade in 2010, and the Phase 6A structures in 2012, by which time the client was uMzinyathi District Municipality. A treatment works at Ethembeni in the same period.
Same district, three different public bodies, two decades apart, under governments and councils that changed more than once in between. Nobody re-appoints a contractor out of sentiment. They re-appoint because the last structure held.
What Repeat Appointments Actually Prove
The pattern is not unique to uMzinyathi. Across the project database:
- Fifteen contracts for UGU District Municipality between 1997 and 2015 — water schemes, reservoirs, treatment works and a sewer treatment works, over eighteen years.
- Umgeni Water from 1995 to 2014, ending with the Lower Tugela secondary bulk supply scheme.
- Seven bridge and road contracts for the KZN Department of Transport between 2003 and 2015.
- Three for Kokstad, three for Msunduzi, five for uThukela Water.
Those spans cross the local government elections of 1995 and 1996, 2000, 2006, 2011, 2016 and 2021. A client that comes back to you after an election is a client whose engineering department, not its politics, decided you were worth the trouble. That is the only kind of repeat work a contractor should want, and it is the only kind that survives a change of council.
Working Where It Is Difficult
There is no useful way to write about Msinga in the early 1990s without acknowledging that it was one of the harder places in the country to run a construction site. That is a matter of public record, and writing around it would be dishonest.
What it meant in practice was ordinary and unglamorous: access that had to be negotiated rather than assumed, labour drawn from the immediate area rather than bussed in, plant that could not be left standing idle, and a programme that had to absorb days when nothing could be done. None of that is a story about heroism. It is a story about planning for the site you actually have.
It is also why we still source local labour on every site we run, and why we would rather grow a foreman than import one. On a contract in a rural district, the people who live nearest the work are the reason it gets finished, and they are the ones left with it afterwards.
What A Contractor Owes During An Election
Very little, and that is the point. The most useful thing a contractor can be during an election period is boring.
Our ethos commits us to open-book commercial accounting on turnkey contracts, no double-invoicing and no hidden variations. At election time that is the entire policy: the rate does not move because the council did, the programme does not slip because an approval is waiting on a new committee, and the certificate shows the same thing it would have shown in any other month.
Infrastructure gets announced in campaign season. It gets built, or not built, in the four or five years afterwards, by which time nobody is watching. The second part is the part a contractor is responsible for.
What Actually Changes After The Vote
Practically, for anyone with work in progress or work about to start: expect new committee members who have not seen the project history, budgets that are re-adopted rather than simply carried over, and approvals that take longer for a few months while people find their feet. None of that is anybody acting in bad faith. It is a handover, and handovers are slow.
The way to survive it is record-keeping. We strictly respect the JBCC, GCC and FIDIC frameworks and keep the paperwork accordingly, which is unexciting right up to the moment a new official asks why a variation was issued eighteen months ago and the answer has to be a document rather than a recollection.
The Long Test
Mawele High School was opened more than thirty years ago by a President who told the people standing there that it was now theirs to make work. We were the contractor. We were not the story, and we should not have been.
The only verdict that matters on any of this arrives decades later, long after the council that commissioned it has been voted in and out several times over: is it still standing, and does it still do what it was built to do. That is the test we would like to be judged on, and it is not one an election can settle.