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Electrical and mechanical industry which forms core of any development in a nation has discovered a bug in Botswana as the industry has been invaded by bogus and uncertified players whose existence is being blamed on the system for appointing such people or contractors for the job.

Amid good working relationship between the Department of Building Engineering Services (DBES) and Association of Electrical Mechanical Contractors of Botswana (AEMCB), the latter feels more can be done to cure a plague of corruption affecting electrical and mechanical sector.

Speaking to The Business Diary AEMCB President Justice Moilwa said since three years ago when government and infrastructure developers unilaterally agreed that contractors can appoint their own sub-contractors, corruption and shoddy jobs have sneaked into the sector.

Moilwa called upon DBES to step-up its monitoring role as a regulator and weed out unscrupulous players in the sector.

Commenting on the role DBES has played in developing local citizen companies, the president acknowledged the value DBES has brought to the citizen owned companies as a positive thing for the country.

He however, lamented that with the current system it has become difficult to award jobs to various companies as the new system has promoted nepotism, incompetence and poor workmanship.

Over the years government had used nomination appointment compared to domestic appointment by contractor to award electrical and mechanical tenders.

“Domestic appointment is a big setback; DBES need to play monitoring eye for the government. Domestic form of appointment breathes corruption,” said Moilwa.

He also said domestic appointment has promoted nepotism, brown-envelope exchange and bogus players in the sector.

“DBES has the obligation to interrogate these guys’ (bogus players) curriculum vitae, track records and performance,” added Moilwa.

Commenting on the move by government to domestic appointment, Moilwa said nomination appointment had promoted growth of local players in the electrical and mechanical engineering sector though eventually some of the players had failed to deliver the projects on time.

“Nomination played a lot of growth promotion as it forced a lot of contractors to appoint local sub- contractors.

Over a number of years government had encouraged citizen empowerment prior to domestic nomination.”

Moilwa said through domestic appointment contractors now appoint their own friends; inflate quotations making the industry to move backward and forward in terms of growth.

After realizing these corruption trends in the industry, AEMCB set out to fight the corruption through policy advocating and hopes are high that government will respond to the Associations’ plea.

“We have negotiated for them to go back to the previous systems as the industry is witnessing a lot of shoddy works,” said Moilwa highlighting that government loses a lot of money to phony sub-contractors.

“The government needs to expedite this form of appointment,” he added.

Moilwa feels that the government should go back to nomination system to ensure that jobs are given to qualified people.

He is of the opinion that the Association’s cannot allow substandard jobs done on some of the most basic jobs like building of schools.

Quizzed whether the Associations members are not part of the breeding corruption, Moilwa denied.

“We have members across the grades who are genuine people of service. They have joined because they do not support corruption,” he said adding that corruption has short gains.

On quality of service offered by members of the Association he said they have grown considerably citing projects such as building of a High Voltage Substations in the country.

“Complexity is nothing anymore; failure to handle big projects to Association members is just a myth.”

AEMCB has more than 20 years of operation in Botswana and only a handful of electrical and mechanical contractors are affiliated and active with the organization.

However despite professional growth in the electrical and mechanical engineering field, Moilwa indicated that 80% of the sector’s works are in the hands of likely bogus people who are not members but act outside the jurisdiction of the Association.