Thabiso Likhole didn't always want to be an engineer, and he certainly had no idea that, at 26, he would become South Africa's first "homegrown" specialist construction manager.

However, he is more than happy about the way things turned out. Currently a member of a construction management team from ASA Construction Services that is handling a multimillion rand four-station project for the SA Rail Commuter Corporation, he is responsible for the day-to-day running of the project - and an enthusiastic advocate of CM as a method of empowerment.

Born on the East Rand, Likhole finished his schooling in Lesotho, and planned a career in medicine - until he met an American civil engineer working on a Peace Corps project "who was so enthusiastic about what he was doing that I just had to find out more".

Find out he did, and spent the next three years getting a civil engineering diploma at the Polytech in Maseru, before returning to South Africa in 1994 to finish a BTech degree and work as the site engineer on a number of infrastructure projects and commercial developments, including the Johannesburg athletics stadium and a R60-million shopping centre at Hammanskraal.

Then, in late 1996, Likhole really began to seek out practical ways to empower local communities through infrastructure projects in their areas. He helped bring together the Department of Public Works, the Nigel Transitional Local Council and the Nigel Development Forum to undertake a R5-million roads project in Duduza - and was responsible for ensuring local people got both the bulk of the work and the training necessary to carry it out.

What is more, he then persuaded the financiers to put R100 000 towards setting up a self-supporting local plant to manufacture interlocking concrete pavers. It created 65 new jobs and was soon producing 15 000 pavers a day - all to strict Concrete Institute standards. These were initially used to pave some of the local roads, but were soon being sold commercially.

This experience also led Likhole to confront directly some of the difficulties inherent in most empowerment schemes: the first being the fact that emerging contractors are often not in the tender "system" so have no knowledge of potential work.

"Then there is the fact that in many one or two man businesses, there is no time or money for off-site training to improve their chances of getting bigger jobs, and lastly, the fact that contractors who have become established sometimes resist sharing work with anyone else."

What was needed, he felt, was a new way of doing things: a system in which emerging contractors would be deliberately sought out and asked to tender for work in their field of expertise; in which management training would take place on-site; and in which the potential for main contractor / sub-contractor conflict would be minimised.

"Construction management addresses all these needs and, although relatively new to South Africa, is rapidly proving its worth, when properly applied, in empowering small contractors to compete in the mainstream. As such, I believe it is the real key to a good future for our building industry."

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