South Africa is at least 15 to 20 years behind Europe and the US in material engineering, and, in an environment of rapidly expanding infrastructure, the current dearth of formally trained materials engineers and physical metallurgists is seriously impacting growth opportunities on the continent.
“For the past 30 years, South Africa’s universities have focused on extractive metallurgy, particularly for mining, rather than physical metallurgy and materials engineering, leaving major civil and infrastructure projects without in‑house specialists who understand how different materials behave, fail, and need to be specified, tested and monitored,” explains Dr Janet Cotton, founder and CEO at One Eighty Materials Engineering Solutions.
Cotton estimates there are around 3 000 specialist materials engineering firms in the United States alone, employing in the region of 200 000 to 300 000 professional materials engineers. By contrast, Africa’s 1.5 billion people are served by only a handful of commercial materials engineering laboratories of meaningful scale.
According to Cotton, Africa’s scarcity of specialist materials engineers and accredited labs means that everyday business decisions are being taken with a dangerously incomplete view of how assets will behave over time.
“Without in‑house expertise, Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) professionals will cut and paste old specifications, opting for indiscriminate material selection and defaulting to whatever worked on the last 10 projects. For operators, this translates into assets that were modelled for 25‑year lifespans quietly failing after five or ten years, with no reliable life‑prediction or wear modelling to warn them. Where newer, better‑performing materials exist, they are frequently not considered, and where global standards call for higher‑grade materials, local work‑arounds are common,” she warns.
The cost of the knowledge deficit
Cotton points to Eskom’s Medupi and Kusile power stations as typical examples of gross failures due to a lack of understanding of appropriate metallurgy, which she says left the country with two power stations that will never run at full capacity. But it’s not just construction projects that are at risk. Cotton explains that similar issues are playing out across multiple industries.
In food, renewables, and broader manufacturing, she says under‑specified materials and superficial quality assurance and quality control have led to total product recalls, environmental spills and delayed commissioning – sometimes triggering late‑delivery payouts worth hundreds of millions of rands. For financiers, the shortage of credible materials engineering and root cause expertise translates into higher technical risk on every deal, undermining projected returns and triggering costly remediation or replacement.
For insurers, even small, under‑tested components can drive outsized claims and Cotton shares an example of a renewables plant where failed elbow joints led to a R500‑million late‑delivery payout. What’s more, she warns that for legal firms, weak or technically incorrect failure reports drive long, complex disputes, forcing clients to bring in costly overseas experts, which raises litigation costs and makes it harder to resolve engineering‑related claims.
“The net result is that our African industries are carrying higher technical risk, higher insurance and project costs, and more downtime and reputational damage. More than this, we are now exporting high‑value engineering and root cause analysis work offshore instead of building vital local capital expertise,” Cotton says.
Industry experts gather to address the challenge
Against this backdrop, the second Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Africa conference will take place in Cape Town from the 9th to the 11th of March this year. The event aims to shift the default from exporting problems and tests overseas to building local capital of expertise in Africa’s own materials engineering community.
“This Pan‑African conference will put these materials engineering failures under the spotlight, with the goal of changing how risk is managed before projects break ground,” says Antonio Massella, disaster and risk management consultant at One Eighty Materials Engineering Solutions and conference director. “On one level, it is a structured situation report on just how far behind South Africa and the continent are in materials engineering. More importantly, it is also a working forum for the ecosystem that ultimately bears the cost of these failures to brainstorm and find solutions.”
The conference at Vredenheim Wine Estate will bring together material engineers, risk engineers and O&M leaders, as well as underwriters, loss adjusters, lawyers, financiers, regulators and laboratory specialists from across the continent. The agenda has been designed to cater for all parts of the ecosystem and Cape Town Mayoral Committee Member for Economic Growth, Alderman James Vos, has agreed to open the conference, proving the growing recognition of the link between materials performance, infrastructure reliability, and economic growth.
Other speakers such as Lucien Matthews will add to the discussion along with technical specialists from law firms, insurers, consulting firms and institutions such as the CSIR. Roundtables and fireside chats will encourage frank discussion and address contentious subjects including the future of the force majeure.
“This conference should be a starting point for changing the culture from post‑facto, blame and liability to one of preparedness and prevention. Where proactive root cause analysis, proper testing and credible local expertise are built into projects from the outset rather than bought in after they fail,” Massella says.
