Local contractors say bid qualifications requirements are unnecessarily high

At a glance, The Big We is a book that appears to spread the Ugafuturist-vision. But then you read the subtitle: “A Blueprint for Sustainable Growth of The Local Construction Industry in Uganda.”
The author later clarifies that the BIG WE is an acronym for ‘Business Development, Infrastructure quality, Graduates, Wages and Exports.’
He wastes no time in dispensing home truths of the technical and intellectual variety. These are truths, which will benefit students and practitioners of civil engineering and related disciplines.
In fact, due to its fluency of content and wealth of style, this book can be read by anybody, who likes a good read.
Why construction?
“The construction sector currently accounts more than 12 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), second after agriculture and employs more than seven million Ugandans. The jobs offered in the construction industry are more predictable and offer better human capital gains than those offered in the agriculture sector. “Construction projects have steadily increased, both in number and average size, creating more opportunities for entrepreneurship, professional practice and employment,” Dr Buregyeya writes.
Dr Buregyeya tells us more, “Currently, the cost of financing for local firms is more than 20 percent, which makes it difficult for them to compete favourably with foreign firms, which can get finance at as low as 1percent, in their home countries. For long, local contractors have advocated for a construction industry development fund in Uganda Development Bank (UDB) that would offer fair and levelled financing at a single-digit interest rate of say 6-9 percent per annum.”
This is not the only hurdle thrown in the way of the construction sector. “Local contractors also complain that bid qualifications requirements are unnecessarily high, which gives advantage to foreign contractors. Some of the requirements they consider unrealistic are the annual turnover and technical/works value of works of similar nature and bank guarantees -which are very expensive When local firms are given any quarter, “local contractors complain that, even for the low-value public projects to which they have been relegated, payments delay, sometimes for years.”
The author offers a cocktail of solutions, many of which focus on policies of the 422-member Uganda National Association of Building and Civil Engineering Contractors (UNABCEC), an umbrella body of engineering contractors and suppliers in the construction industry.
He believes UNABCEC can serve as a rally point from which the Big We results in Ugandans taking control of their own construction projects without lowering quality standards or losing efficiency.