The National Construction Industry Council (NCIC) has said it has put in place a number of strategies to ensure sanity in the construction industry.
NCIC Chief Executive Officer engineer Gerald Khonje said during a media interface that the strategies will, among other things, ensure adherence to quality standards as well as cost control.
According to Khonje, the construction industry is a complicated one as it involves many stakeholders.
He said NCIC has developed the Malawi Infrastructure Delivery Management Standards (MIDMS) to respond to poor project planning and management, which result into poor quality infrastructure.
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The MIDMS will act as a guide to all construction industry players for them to implement quality infrastructure as it will close knowledge gaps that have hitherto hindered quality.
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Khonje said the MIDMS provides guidelines to every stakeholder on how any project can be conceived, planned, designed, procured, executed as well as maintained.
He added that NCIC has developed Construction Cost Indices which are a guide on what is to be expected in terms of cost.
“So the indices will help in terms of budgeting for infrastructure projects. They will also help in terms of pricing of projects so that people do not overprice or underprice projects
“At the same time, this will also be a benchmark, in terms of any price fluctuations or escalations depending on the economic factors, so that people can have a benchmark against which to measure this,” Khonje said.
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He added that NCIC is looking at developing a National Infrastructure Maintenance Scheme or strategy that will ensure that Malawi’s infrastructure is well maintained.
“We have a lot of infrastructure assets in the country. Some of which are in dilapidated state because they have not been maintained for a long time.
“So what we are saying is that once a project is completed, it should immediately enter a maintenance scheme so that periodic assessment of its state and any sort of defects that might have developed can be rectified in good time,” Khonje said.
One of the media practitioners, Rose Kamera, thanked NCIC for the interface.
