SIMON MUNTEMBA writes
@SunZambian
MINISTER of Housing and Infrastructure Development Ronald Chitotela has urged the National Council for Construction (NCC) to decentralise its training school to ensure more Zambians are trained and benefit from the sector.
Mr. Chitotela said the NCC should establish construction schools in all the 10 provinces so that more people accessed the construction training it was offering.
He said imparting of construction knowledge in people was important because it was a lifelong skill and one way of creating employment for the people.
Mr Chitotela was speaking in Lusaka yesterday when the NCC board chairperson, Roseta Chabala, presented the NCC 2018 Annual Report.
“It is important that you seriously start thinking of decentralising your training. If you cannot manage to establish the school in all the 10 provinces, you can start with setting up schools in two or three provinces,” he said.
“This will greatly help because people will not have to travel long distances to come to Lusaka to attend classes,” Mr Chitotela said.
The NCC should be aggressive in carrying out its mandate.
He said the council had a lot of power in ensuring that construction companies did not flout rules.
In response, Mrs Chabala said the NCC was working hard to ensure that the 20 percent sub-contracting policy was strictly adhered to by all big construction companies.
She said statistics showed that there was a reduction in the resources allocated to foreign contractors from 90 percent in 2017 to 85 percent in 2018.
Mrs Chabala said there was a clear indication that the 20 percent sub-contracting policy was bearing fruit.
She said the NCC was engaging individual local contractors to consider merging so that they formed bigger companies and compete for big contracts.
