Elias Munapo

Engen Refinery plant is part of the Engen Petroleum Limited, with operations in Southern Africa. The plant is situated in KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa and it operates 24 hours a day, every day, including weekends. Although Engen operates 24 hours 7 days a week, the plant has to be shut down occasionally for maintenance. These shutdown periods are also used as an opportunity to implement most projects, especially those that could not be implemented during the normal run of the plant. In order to ensure that the plant operations are not interrupted, it is preferable to work on the equipment while the plant is not operational. The shutdown periods are very limited in time, so it is of utmost importance to complete tasks within the given turnaround period in order to get the plant back on line in time to deliver products as scheduled to customers. The main objective of this study is to explore the causes and consequences of delays in project execution and their impact on the success of the project. The study identified poor communication, repetition of tasks, resource allocation, scope change, procurement process management, inadequate planning and poor budget estimates as major contributors to delays and cost escalation during project execution. It is recommended that Engen Refinery put some means together to improve the above-mentioned issues

The study is aimed at establishing the impact of access to capital, access to markets, access to information and access to technology on competitiveness of smallholder farmers on the market in Ethekwini Metropolitan in South Africa. A questionnaire is used as a research instrument. A total of 100 participants was sampled from a population of 485 smallholder farmers in Ethekwini Metropolitan. From the sample, 21% were male and 79% were female. All respondents were all from the African race. The study reveales that access to funding, access to markets, access to information and access to technology not only influenced viability of the smallholder farmers in Ethekwini Metropolitan, but also that the smallholder farmers were not getting enough access to all four stated variables. Of the 100 farmers, 66% of the smallholder farmers had plots with less than 0.5 acres under cultivation. Another finding was that even though the farmers had basic tools to work with, they required funding to acquire irrigation, water storage facilities, transport and tractors. As far as passing information to farmers is concerned, the farmers mostly preferred extension visits.The study recommends that well equipped agricultural resource centres be established in all the agricultural hubs. It is also recommended that the government employs an asset based community development approach when funding smallholder farmers and that the smallholder farmers and other stakeholders be conscientized on the concept of sustainable farming

The constructs of servant leadership (SL) and emotional intelligence (EI) have gained considerable interest in the discipline of managerial leadership, both within academic discourse and in the human capital management and development arena. However, empirical evidence showed the need for further research on both constructs using the mixed methods approach. The purpose of this research was to explore the role of an integrated servant leadership and emotional intelligence leadership skills program in enhancing leadership performance in Zimbabwe’s commercial banking sector. A mixed methods research triangulation concurrent design was adopted for the research study conducted from 2014 to 2015. A survey questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data from 211 middle, senior and executive managerial staff in the commercial banking sector. SPSS version 22.0 was used to analyze the quantitative data. Qualitative data were collected from a purposive sample of eight senior to executive managers using a structured interview guide and multimedia recording equipment. The qualitative data were analyzed using NVIVO version 10 software package to create themes. The findings showed that servant leadership and emotional intelligence characteristics complement each other and both constructs can be integrated into a managerial leadership program used to develop leadership soft skills or competencies. The findings also showed that both SL and EI skills had a positive influence in enhancing the managers’ effectiveness in undertaking leadership responsibilities and on leadership qualitative performance measures such as articulating vision and strategy, building and sustaining productive organizational culture, development and retention of talent, enhancing employee engagement, improving stakeholder relationship management, retaining bank customers, promotion of diversity, value creation and community involvement. The study led to the development of an integrated SL and EI soft skills leadership program and model which, if implemented, could lead to leadership skills development and performance enhancement.

Keywords: leadership, competencies, servant leadership and emotional intelligence.
JEL Classification: E58, G21, M12

The South African public sector is faced with many challenges and one of the major challenges is service delivery. This is linked with skills shortage resulting in public service having too many people to train in a short period of time. Training these many employees face-to-face has its challenges, as employees have to be away from their day-to-day duties to attend training and this not only has an impact on productivity, but also maximizes costs. To deal with and to minimize these challenges, the South African government has chosen to introduce e-Learning in public sector. This is aimed at ensuring that larger numbers of government officials are trained at minimum costs and ensuring that training reaches people with different responsibilities such as top management and people with families who cannot afford to be away from home or office for training for long periods of time. This study examined the advantages and disadvantages of the introduction of e-Learning in the public sector, the importance of strategic planning for e-Learning, the challenges faced by the public sector when it comes to training, how other organizations internationally have conceptualized e-Learning and what the public sector is hoping to achieve by introducing e-Learning. The gaps in the conceptualization of e-Learning in the South African public sector were identified and possible solutions including a paradigm shift from a reductionist way of thinking to a systems way of thinking and doing things was recommended.

Keywords: e-Learning, public sector, benchmarking, conceptualization.
JEL Classification: H83, A2, G21

The main purpose of this paper is to document some challenges faced by Independent Development Trust (IDT) in infrastructure delivery of the provincial government of KwaZulu-Natal. Infrastructure delivery has a significant effect on the local budgets or budgets of projects in the province. The main focus of the study was the root causes of delays, budgetary overruns and the resultant effect on service delivery back-logs and socio-economic impact caused by such delays. The study setting comprised of professional stakeholders in the built environment and these include specialists and professionals in the engineering, construction management, civil and general building fields. The objectives of this study were achieved by means of a self-administered questionnaire that was distributed to a group of participants, composed of project managers, quantity surveyors, engineers, architects and project managers working with IDT. The nature of the research was quantitative and data analysis used descriptive and a bit of inferential statistics to arrive at some generalizations and conclusions. The study was able to affirm that there are major inefficiencies in the current infrastructure delivery model of the South African government. Major causes identified include factors such as delays in payments, poor planning, subsiding levels of professional ethics and standards exercised by professionals in the built environment, and so forth. The study also made some recommendations from the research findings. Clearly the infrastructure delivery model requires a new trajectory in tackling the under-development and triple challenges of poverty, unemployment and slow economic growth.

The paper presents factors why people are reluctant to bank money in rural Southern African countries. Six countries namely Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe were used in the study. A focus group of 10 people from each of the stated Southern African countries was composed and used to obtain perceptions, views, reactions, attitudes, experiences among others on why people are reluctant to bank their money. People are unwilling to bank their money in rural Southern Africa and the reasons behind this seem to be many. If no correctional measures are put in place, rural Southern Africa will continue to be unbanked for the next five decades.