Mpho Makgosa talks lightly about his three-year dry spell. In his modest office in Tlokweng, he is relating how, after quitting formal employment to launch his company, he went for all those years without a single project coming his way. How did he survive?
“It was by grace of God,” he responds.
Then he mentions the “support team” ÔÇô his family. Though his mother was initially opposed to the idea of her son branching off into business, she eventually came round and became a pillar of support.
Makgosa graduated with a civil engineering degree from the University of Botswana in 2007. After a few years working for civil engineering consultancy firms, he felt he had enough experience to go on his own.
Enviroworks Civil & Building Contractors opened for business in 2010. Makgosa was aged 26. Nothing would have prepared him for what he was about to encounter.
“Before resigning from my previous job, I had saved some money that I believed would sustain me for quite a long time, but when I had to buy office equipment, software, stationery, pay office rent, and my own salary I realised that my savings were inadequate,” he states. “It was really tough. I now had to learn to do something I had never had to worry about before, which is going around marketing the company to different government ministries, government departments, and parastatals. When you work for someone else, you operate behind the scenes yet you are the one doing the work, and they get all the shine and praise, but people don’t know who actually does the work. Now when you get out and say, ‘kana that building, that pipeline, or that road it’s me who designed it, it’s me who supervised its construction’, people say ‘oh really’.”
That he was entering a business that is not easy to crack into didn’t make it any easier. He had to deal with the general attitude that takes a dim view of young people.
“There is this concern in people’s minds whether you will be able to deliver and you can’t blame them because many have been disappointed before by other young people who came into the industry well before us who didn’t take the industry as seriously as it needs to be taken,” he says.
Such was his resolve to make it in business that even as he found himself walking up a steep slope, the thought of quitting never crossed his mind.
“I knew that in the beginning I wasn’t going to expect manna to fall from heaven,” he explains. “I had expected it to be tough because in Botswana for you to be recognised and be known you need to crack a couple of doors, you need to market your business. You need to network.”
From interactions with the youth office at the Ministry of Infrastructure, Science and Technology, Makgosa found himself as part of an initiative to lobby for young people in construction, Botswana Youth Contractors Association, which he has chaired since inception.
He concedes that the history of abandoned projects by local contractors has given Batswana a bad name.
“It goes back to the fact that people do not have respect for the industry and the primary reason for that is that people are not professionals of the industry. If you are a real professional of your industry and you have taken an oath upon completion of your studies to uphold its ethics and integrity, you wouldn’t do such a thing,” he says.
He talks of a paradigm-shift that is being led by Botswana Youth Contractors Association to protect the integrity of the construction industry, and to ensure that members uphold the rules at all times. He argues that part of the problem is that anyone can own a construction without a qualification in any of the disciplines within the construction industry.
To that end, membership of the Botswana Youth Contractors Association is confined to people with some qualification within the industry. He wants to see a regulation introduced to restrict ownership of construction companies only to people with industry-related qualifications.
Makgosa says to get Batswana to be meaningful players in the industry that is currently dominated by foreign companies, there has to be a deliberate shift towards citizen empowerment.
One suggestion he puts forward is that foreign contractors who are awarded large projects in Botswana must be compelled to subcontract citizen-owned companies.
“There are very few citizen contractors who are at Grade E and Unlimited Grade, and the reason is that there are less citizens who do the amount of work that would qualify them to be in those grades. It boils down to empowerment by the government. If you give local contractors some medium-scale projects they will ultimately build experience, as well as capacity in terms of equipment and finance to be able to compete with these big international companies.
Part of the reason the few big local contractors shy away from competing for large projects is that when you get a tender document it just tells you that you do not qualify for the project. If, for example, you are required to have a security bond of P500 million, where will you get that as a local contractor?” he says. “We don’t have the financial muscle as local contractors, and it’s because we are not given work.”
He goes on: “We are not crying for government to give us these multi-billion Pula projects; we are saying give us something to work with so that we can build our experience, profile, and capacity so that we would be able one day to compete internationally and to see one local contractor doing some work in China, or Dubai.”
He warns that the danger of failing to capacitate citizens is that Botswana, as a nation, is failing to build capacity that could in future compete for international projects.
“The government spends billions of Pula educating young people to learn to become engineers, technicians, and all the professionals you find in our market but if you do not give them the opportunity to show their capability as professionals we are not going anywhere as a nation and we will continue to be over-dependent on foreign businesses,” he says.
He cites lack of support for killing the ambition of young contractors like himself to venture outside Botswana.
“These Chinese contractors have done lots of work in China, and the Chinese government has confidence that wherever they go they will deliver. But if I go to Zambia, for example, and the Zambian government asks me what I have done in Botswana, what will I show?” he asks. “I have nothing to show. That would be an embarrassment on its own.”
