Let the games begin

A Chinese architectural firm has won its first contract in Africa, designing venues for the All-Africa Games in 2015

When the All-Africa Games are declared open in Brazzaville in 2015 they will have come full circle, having first been held in the city 50 years earlier.

The games are much bigger than they were all those years ago, when the capital of the Republic of Congo hosted 30 nations and 2,500 athletes at what were then called the Pan African Games. In 2015 more than 50 nations and about 5,000 athletes are due to take part.

Playing a key role in this gigantic birthday party will be a Chinese architectural consulting company, CCDI group, which is designing stadiums for the games on the northern outskirts of Brazzaville and hopes to use the contract as a springboard to turn Africa into its biggest market.

The contract for a 60,000-seat stadium and facilities, including a smaller stadium, a swimming pool, outdoor venues and surrounding roads, is worth $441 million (341 million euros).

CCDI's parent company, China State Construction Engineering Corporation, won the bid last October.

The government of the Republic of Congo is footing the bill for the games, including all construction costs.

Lv Qiang, deputy general manager of the sports facilities department of CCDI, says the biggest challenge is how to design and build the stadiums safely and on time.

The Chinese company has sent two groups of designers to work in Brazzaville for three months each, including architects, interior designers and civil, electrical, structural, water supply and drainage engineers.

The country's official language is French, and the company has transferred its employees and Chinese staff who are proficient in the language to work on the projects.

The Republic of Congo, with a population of 4.36 million and an industrial sector based on petroleum, is aiming to become a middle-income country, according to the government's economic development plan.

The country's abundant supply of metal, gold, iron, phosphate and other natural resources underpin the country's economy.

The government says it wants to use the 2015 games to raise its international profile.

Several Western oil companies and financial service providers began moving to the country to develop resource-related businesses since 2009.

CCDI says it has been hamstrung because of the country's poor infrastructure, the Internet being slow and power cuts frequent.

"We have a 50-people backup team in our Beijing office to support the field designs, and we are trying to bring a video-conference system into the country to improve communications between Beijing and Brazzaville," Lv says.

"One advantage of having staff on the spot is that they can consult other team members without having to go through headquarters. Our engineers can resolve technical problems on the basis of what is happening on the ground."

To get around power cuts, the team has started to use generators that ensure enough power to at least run computers.

Wang Jiayi, the project's field manager in the Republic of Congo, says designing construction projects in Africa is fraught with difficulties. Full weekend breaks for the team's architects and engineers is a rarity because of the workload, and they work under a totally different system of construction standards.

"This isn't an aid or an engineering, procurement and construction project. It's a common form of contracting for Chinese contractors in Africa's construction industry. So we cannot apply Chinese standards to build stadiums here. Every detail needs to be run by our Congolese clients and their French supervision company, the project's third party invited by the Congolese government."

Wang, 40, says this is CCDI's first project in Africa, and quality is essential in a new market where price is still a sensitive issue. The company has plans to do design work for buildings in Algeria, Cameroon and Guinea and South Africa, and says it believes its abundant human resources, competitive prices and technology will help it gain contracts.

"Designing stadiums in the Republic of Congo is little different to doing the same thing elsewhere. One small drawback is that there are few supermarkets here, and the stuff you buy is fairly expensive because most of it is imported."

Chinese companies are no strangers to building stadiums in Africa. From Accra to Nairobi, Oran to Maputo, they have built 53 stadiums throughout the continent, the China International Contractors Association in Beijing says.

One big challenge CCDI faces with the sports venues in Brazzaville is to make them sustainable in the long-term, economically and in other ways, a common problem for stadiums throughout Africa.

In the case of the main stadium in Brazzaville, CCDI has designed a multi-purpose venue that can quickly be turned into a football ground, a concert venue or several tennis courts. Energy-saving lighting. and facilities made of environmentally friendly materials are said to be prominent in the plans.

China State Construction Engineering Corporation and CCDI, with their experience, will train the Brazzaville stadium operators to diversify the stadium's commercial functions so that wedding ceremonies, political rallies, and show business events can be held there. An athletes' training gym that can be rented out is also being built as part of the main stadium.

Wang He, vice-president of the China International Contractors Association, which helps Chinese companies facilitate construction business abroad, says: "Even though the continent's economic growth seems dynamic and has been less hampered by the global crisis, African governments are more inclined to allocate cash to boost energy, agriculture, manufacturing and infrastructure sectors than to give money for stadium maintenance."

Unlike stadiums in Europe and the United States, which are often owned by companies, most stadiums in Africa are aid projects and operated by local authorities. The reality of such venues turning into white elephants has added acutely to the financial burdens of governments and taxpayers. Many stadiums in Africa simply do not have the money to remain viable.

Local communities, hotels and public entities can buy athletes' villages built for big events, but stadiums need large amounts of government revenue for basic maintenance, and few have any interest in buying them, even if they could afford to do so.

In Angola, for the 40,000-seat Luanda stadium, one of four stadiums built by Chinese companies for the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations, maintenance and operating costs are $3 million a year.

Wang says Chinese stadium contractors need to pay special attention to this issue as African people have high expectations in that regard and sometimes struggle to find suitable service providers for their stadiums.

Rather than waiting, Chinese construction companies such as Shanghai Construction Group and China Overseas Engineering Group Co. Ltd have offered to provide low-cost solutions and services for stadium maintenance in Africa.

Last year, Shengli Engineering Construction (Group) Co Ltd of Shandong, a subsidiary of the oil giant Sinopec, won a contract to upgrade Moi International Sports Center in Nairobi, a stadium neglected for several decades. The contract is worth $12.5 million.

zhongnan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 05/31/2013 page22)