By Eng. Willings Sichalwe
Zambia is in the middle of one of its largest infrastructure pushes in a generation, with roads, border facilities, water schemes and energy projects rolling out to support economic diversification and regional trade. Eng. Willings Sichalwe argues that in an environment of tight financing and rising scrutiny from citizens and development partners, ethics has stopped being a soft professional virtue. It has become the discipline that decides whether public and donor money actually survives contact with a project site.
Why Integrity Is Now a Fiscal Question
Infrastructure backlogs and financing gaps remain significant across Zambia, which means every kwacha and every dollar of concessional financing committed to a road, dam or water scheme has to work harder than it once did. In that setting, ethics is not an abstract ideal sitting alongside engineering. It is the foundation the engineering has to stand on.
Where regulatory enforcement is still maturing, the ethical stance of the consulting engineer often becomes the last line of defence against poor quality, inflated costs and unsafe outcomes. Decisions taken at feasibility, design, procurement and construction stages carry consequences well beyond the project itself. They shape whether institutions retain public confidence and whether communities receive the services they were promised. The core principles of the FIDIC Code of Ethics, namely integrity, competence, impartiality, fairness and zero tolerance for corruption, are therefore best read as operational requirements rather than aspirational language. They shape how projects are conceived, procured, designed and delivered.
Pillar One: Individual Accountability and the Cost of Cutting Corners
Ethical leadership begins with individual accountability, and in the Zambian and wider African context that plays out in very concrete situations: pressure to certify incomplete works to unlock payment, requests to informally adjust a bill of quantities, or an expectation to overlook non-compliance to preserve a relationship. What separates a leader is the ability to hold the technical truth in those moments.
The pressure to absorb budgets before year-end, hit political timelines or keep a project visibly moving can push teams to bypass due process, compress technical reviews or accept weak documentation. It can look like progress in the short term. In practice it tends to show up later as cost overruns, claims and disputes, assets that fail prematurely, and a public that trusts engineering advice less. Integrity requires engineers to flag risk transparently even when a client or sponsor would rather not hear it, to keep evidence ahead of external pressure, and to manage conflicts of interest actively, including parallel commercial relationships that could compromise judgement. Impartiality has to be practised deliberately too, for instance by applying the same technical standard to every contractor regardless of their perceived influence.
Competence sits inside the same ethical obligation. Gaps in hydrology, geotechnical or traffic data, combined with climate variability and fast urbanisation, can produce designs that are unsafe or too costly for a client to maintain. Continuous professional development, regional experience and peer review are what keep advice given in Lusaka, Solwezi or Mongu aligned with international practice while still fitting local conditions.
Pillar Two: Institutionalising Integrity Through BIMS
Individual integrity matters, but it is not enough on its own to hold across multiple projects, offices and staff turnover. Lasting change needs ethics built into systems, so that standards do not depend on which individual happens to be on site.
The FIDIC Business Integrity Management System, or BIMS, offers a practical framework for firms making that shift, translating principles into processes and controls that survive personnel changes. In the Zambian and African context, the core elements include:
- Clear and enforced anti-corruption policies covering bribery, facilitation payments and improper inducements across public and private commissions
- Transparent, documented procedures for procurement support, tender evaluation and recommendations, particularly where the engineer is advising a public client
- Governance safeguards such as defined reporting lines, whistleblowing mechanisms and protection for staff who raise concerns about irregularities
- Regular internal reviews and independent audits of project and corporate practice, with corrective actions tracked over time
The economic case for this is direct. Firms with strong integrity systems tend to manage project risk better, face fewer disputes and demonstrate credibility that matters to both local clients and international financiers. In practice, that translates into better cost control, fewer contested payment certificates and smoother disbursement of development-partner funds, all of which affect how far a fixed infrastructure budget actually stretches.
Young professionals are often closest to project data, design platforms and site records, which puts them in a strong position to flag emerging risks, such as unexplained scope changes or repeated quality failures, before they become expensive. Practical tools that keep a BIMS-style policy from sitting unused on a shelf include simple ethical-risk checklists at project kick-off, anonymous digital channels for reporting concerns, and induction sessions for new staff and site teams on what is expected of them.
Pillar Three: Shaping Industry Practice Through Advocacy
Ethical leadership does not stop at the boundary of one firm or one project. Across Africa there is a clear, growing demand from citizens, civil society and regional bodies for infrastructure delivery that is more transparent, inclusive and sustainable, and young professionals within bodies such as the Association of Consulting Engineers of Zambia (ACEZ) have both the platform and the responsibility to help shape that direction. Concretely, this includes:
- Promoting procurement frameworks that weigh cost against quality, integrity and lifecycle value, including advocating for quality- and cost-based selection over purely lowest-price approaches
- Challenging entrenched practices such as routine variation inflation or under-resourced supervision, which erode standards and can compromise public safety
- Engaging regulators, policymakers and professional bodies to strengthen guidelines, registration requirements and enforcement
- Mentoring students and junior engineers so that ethics is treated as a core competency, illustrated with real Zambian and regional case studies rather than as a theoretical module
Consulting engineers in Zambia influence far more than technical drawings. Their judgement shapes where roads are aligned, how dams are sized, how border facilities are configured and how climate resilience gets built into a design. Aligning with global benchmarks such as the FIDIC Code of Ethics and BIMS, while engaging honestly with local constraints like limited data, funding delays and capacity gaps, is what allows infrastructure programmes to strengthen public institutions rather than quietly erode them.
Business, Investor and Policy Implications
For contracting and consulting firms, integrity systems are increasingly a commercial differentiator, not just a compliance exercise. Firms that can show a functioning anti-corruption policy, documented procurement procedures and an independent audit trail are better placed to win work tied to development-partner financing, where those controls are often a condition of disbursement.
For investors and financiers, the pattern is one already familiar from Zambia’s wider financing conversation: weak governance at project level raises the effective cost of capital, through delays, disputed certificates and renegotiated scope, even when the headline interest rate on financing looks attractive. Strong integrity systems are a way of lowering that hidden risk premium.
For policymakers, the procurement model itself is a fiscal lever. A tender process weighted toward lowest price alone tends to reward the bidder best able to absorb an aggressive quote today and recover it through variations later. Building quality- and integrity-based criteria into procurement, and resourcing independent supervision properly, is a direct way to protect the value of public infrastructure spending over its full life, not just at contract signature.
A Call to Action: Lead, Influence, Redefine
The future of engineering in Africa will be defined as much by trust as by technical innovation. Public tolerance for waste, corruption and unsafe infrastructure is falling, while the demand for accountable, competent professionals is rising. For the next generation of leaders, that means moving beyond narrow compliance and consciously building integrity into how the work gets done, through three connected commitments:
- Lead with integrity, by consistently placing professional principle above short-term convenience or personal gain, even when that is not the easiest path locally
- Influence organisations, by strengthening the systems that institutionalise transparency and accountability, drawing on tools such as BIMS and adapting them to local conditions
- Redefine success, by measuring achievement not only by the number and size of projects delivered, but by the integrity of the process, the durability of the asset, and the trust built with clients, communities and partners
Conclusion
Engineering has always carried a responsibility to clients, communities and society. In Zambia, where every project represents a significant share of national resources, that responsibility is magnified. Meeting it takes more than technical competence. It takes integrity that holds under pressure.
Ethics is not a constraint on engineering in this context. It is the infrastructure that everything else is built on.
Eng. Willings Sichalwe is a Civil Engineer and Council Member of the Future Leaders under the Association of Consulting Engineers of Zambia (ACEZ), specialising in infrastructure development with experience in roads, hydrology and project delivery systems aligned with international best practice and African development priorities. He writes on ethical leadership, institutional integrity and professional accountability in Zambia’s engineering sector.
Related reading: The Economics of Exclusion: How Financing Asymmetry Is Squeezing Zambian Contractors Out of Their Own Market and OAG Reports Simplified: How Zambia Audits the Constituency Development Fund.
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