I was standing on the landing just outside my office door, the East African sun rising, phone in one hand, coffee getting cold in the other, scrolling through 156 pages of the new IRMSA Risk Report.
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I was standing on the landing just outside my office door, the East African sun rising, phone in one hand, coffee getting cold in the other, scrolling through 156 pages of the new IRMSA Risk Report.
Governance failure. Number one, again.
Not exactly light reading for 05:30 in the morning. But I kept going anyway, mostly because I knew the site would soon start filling up.
I’ve read enough of these reports over the years to know how they land. Someone in a boardroom reads the summary, nods, says “concerning,” and moves on to the next agenda item. Nobody argues with it. Nobody’s supposed to. It’s a report, not a fight.
But standing there, mosquitoes buzzing around my head, I thought: I’ve seen this one before. Not in a report. On a site.
That’s where this series was born. Not in a strategy meeting. With a cold cup of coffee.
Let’s give credit where it’s due. The Institute of Risk Management South Africa put serious work into this year’s edition. Governance, the economy, politics, infrastructure, unemployment, climate, corruption, cyber, water, electricity. Ten risks, ranked and argued properly, not just thrown together for a press release.
It’s good work. It’s also written for a specific room.
Executives. Board packs. People who read “governance failure” and picture an institution falling apart from the top down, somewhere far away, in a building with air conditioning that actually works.
I don’t sit in that room. Never have.
I sit in the one underneath it, where the same risk shows up wearing steel-toe boots instead of a suit.
Governance failure at the national level is an institution losing its grip on accountability.
Governance failure on a project is a risk assessment sitting on a desk for two weeks, because nobody wants to be the one who signs it.
Same risk. Smaller room. Same silence right before it breaks.
That’s the pattern I keep seeing across every risk in this report, not just the first one. Water scarcity at national scale is droughts and failing municipal infrastructure. Water risk on a project is a risk assessment written six months ago that assumed the borehole would still be running.
Electricity failure at national scale is grid collapse and load shedding schedules. Electricity risk on a project is the backup generator you were told was “just in case,” now running your whole operation, indefinitely, on hope and diesel.
Economic crisis at national scale is fiscal pressure and a shrinking budget for the country. Economic crisis on a project is the moment finance asks you to justify the safety budget line by line, the same week a contractor asks why the toolbox talks got shorter.
Ask yourself honestly. How many of the ten risks in that report have you already lived through on a site, just never called it that?
Not a summary. Read the PDF yourself if that’s the version you want; it’s genuinely worth the time.
This is the other half. The half that never makes it into a report with a foreword and a cover page, because nobody’s writing that version from inside a site office at 6 am, watching a decision sit unmade while everyone waits to see who blinks first.
Ten risks. Ten weeks. One each, pulled out of the boardroom and put back where I actually watched it happen.
We start next week at number one, the risk currently sitting at the top of the national list, and the one I’ve watched wreck more projects than any of the other nine combined.
Leadership that stopped showing up. And what always, always moves in to fill that silence.
After that, we go through the rest in order. The site that ran on backup generators and hope. The procurement shortcut that became the incident investigation nobody wanted to write. Load shedding, and what “temporary” actually costs a project five years in. All ten, translated out of the boardroom and back into the room where the work actually gets done.
No dashboards. No frameworks with a logo attached. Just what these risks actually look like when the theory runs out, and someone still has to make the call.
I read the report standing with the East African sun rising over the distant hills, coffee gone cold, watching the numbers on the page describe a problem I already knew the shape of.
You’re about to read the version they didn’t write.
Same risk. Smaller room. Ten weeks to go.
