Rwandan engineers and architects have faulted the government for overlooking them and awarding big contracts to foreign engineers, yet they have the numbers, competency and experience to take on the projects.

The engineers said majority of government projects — which they have the capacity to successfully implement — have been given to foreigners.

“It is worrying that the government continues to overlook us in favour of foreign engineers yet we can do the work.

When you look at the current big projects like Bugesera Airport, the stadium and others, there is limited involvement from local engineers” said Papias Kazawadi, the president of the Institute of Engineers Rwanda.

He said one of the factors leading to this is old policies which are yet to be updated for many years but continue to be used by screening institutions.

“I did my research and found out that immigration for instance still uses the selection criterion for foreign firms that was set up in 2000, ignoring the fact that a lot has changed since then” Mr Kazawadi said.

He added that despite the law emphasising skills transfer as one of the conditions to comply with, foreign engineering firms have not satisfactorily complied with this and no follow up is being carried out.

The country has enjoyed a robust construction boom in the past few years, but local engineers have not largely benefited from the big projects, because the government allocated contracts to foreign firms, hence a lot of the money spent on these big projects has not benefited the local economy.

The other issue with foreign engineering firms is that they bring in their own labour force, starting from the professionals to those doing work that doesn’t need technical skills.

In 2015, the government contracted Turkish company Summa Construction Inc to complete construction of the Kigali Convention Centre, however the company flew in engineers from Turkey, who were almost the ones exclusively working on the project. Sources close to the KCC project said that one of Summa’s conditions was to bring in its engineers and other technicians to work on the project, a condition the government agreed to.

Projects like the Marriot Hotel, Vision City and others that have employed Chinese nationals over local technicians.

The other issue is that in case of any fault on the construction, it is the local engineers who are on the ground to fix the problem.

“There is no government policy that favours foreign engineering firms over local engineers, but maybe some old policies need to be changed,” said Emmanuel Hategeka, the deputy CEO of Rwanda Development Board.