The CESA Annual General Meeting was held for the first time as an in-person event on the 22 November 2022, with the option for members to join online.  In his welcoming address CESA President, Olu Soluade, who is embarking on his second year as president of the organisation stated that we continue to find ourselves, as a nation at a crossroads, with high unemployment, the construction mafia out of control, the procurement mafia gaining foothold, zama zamas becoming a threat, a national energy crisis and threats of a looming water crisis and our public infrastructure crumbling. And yet we remain optimistic, we are a nation that thrives on a challenge – we are resilient, adaptable and ingenious! He went on to state that it was painfully apparent that whatever goals we were looking to achieve, whatever message we wanted to convey and whatever progress we wanted to make would be underpinned not by the what, but by the how. 

“We all know what needs to be done to move our industry and our country forward – it is the way we do it which will define our success, and this informed my Presidential theme for 2022 – ‘A Call to Service’. The time had come for us all to get involved in contributing to the economic recovery of our country to get all hands-on deck!” 

As the year in which CESA celebrated its 70th anniversary comes to a close having celebrated 7 decades of ‘Enabling Consulting Engineering Excellence’ we remain committed to pro-active, targeted, effective and constructive engagement with all relevant stakeholders. We continue to believe that it is a time for engineers to more proactively contribute to South Africa’s rebuild project – we need everyone to become involved in ensuring that we make our economic recovery plan a reality whilst contributing to enhancing all of the efforts being made towards meeting as many of the goals contained in the UN Sustainable Goals adopted in 2015, all of which are most pertinently applicable to the challenges we face in our country as we continue to advocate for Quality Cost-Based Selection and value for money which builds on our transformation and inclusivity journey. 

Our CESA Annual Review was distributed at the meeting and can be accessed online at https://www.cesa.co.za/annual-review/annual-review-2022