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Ultra-modern stadium : Start thinking of its management
2005-07-23 07:10:03
By Editor
President Benjamin Mkapa early this week laid the foundation stone for what the wider media and sports officials call an ’ultra-modern stadium,’ in construction for slightly over six months now.
It is being put up by a major Chinese construction firm, and is expected to be completed early 2007, by which, of course, President Mkapa won’t officiate at its opening as Head of State.
Still it remains a monument to his period in high office.
While the building is going on, issues of standards and maintenance won’t be quite on the agenda, and even after it has been opened, the question won’t come up so much.
The reason isn’t that we already have the managers and methods to make sure that its facilities will be kept up to standard and without early, undue wear and tear.
It’s that such questions ordinarily start arising only after destruction has gone far.
Were it that the roads constructed by Konoike Corporation of Japan needed constant management, they would by now have collapsed.
An excellent example is the Kariakoo area in the very heart of Dar es Salaam, whose entire sewage system is clogged, because nobody is responsible to ensure that things go well.
All the city fathers are able to do is to ensure that the roads are swept; by our standards that’s an achievment.
Listening to experts on the Kariakoo problem, picked from august think tanks like the University College of Lands, Architecture and Survey (UCLAS), a wholly different issue is focused.
It relates to the construction of relatively high rise buildings in the area, before the water and sewage infrastructure was in place.
It isn’t to them a sewage management problem per se, as they can’t criticise either the City Council or the government.
In pratical terms it means the private sector in the construction industry awaits bureaucrats in numerous state departments to prepare the right facilities.
Ask them about this and they will turn to raise taxes or levies so as to construct such facilities, in which case buildings come up, land values rise and other problems are sorted out later.
The same will arise in relation to the new National Stadium, or the ”ultra-modern stadium.”
After it has been completed, entrusted to the usual managements that have failed to properly manage the old National Stadium, or the City Council or some other public agency, this same idea will come up.
Quite exciting observations will be made that the stadium was built on artificially high standards, like having an
’Olympic standard swimming pool.’
Field, track and auxilliary facilities become cash cows for some officials.
Thus it is absolutely vital to find the right management formula for the upkeep of the new general facility, and each of its facilities, so that it is kept up to standard, and accessible for various purposes.
There is, of course, a lack of interest in such a question since we have always believed that we are masters of what we do, though we keep failing.
It was so for parastatals, virtually of them collapsing, and many other projects.
One way would be to convert the current building firm into a management company, or it replaces its core staff, lays off the building workers, after construction is ended.
But then it picks up a skeletal management team that controls what is called ’materials,’ what is needed, its timely delivery and scrupulous application (insertion, replacement, repair, etc).
Both in the control of materials and costing, loopholes shouldn’t exist.
This method of project implementation is called Build, Operate and Transfer, which can be done partially, as the project is right from the start a public one.
It calls for some sort of managerial control, whether or not the project isn’t an addition to an external debt that we are seeking to have it cancelled, more or less.
Pretending to be our own masters on this issue may prove a crippling disability once the ’ultra-modern stadium’ opens.
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