Dear Portfolio Committee On Trade and Industry,
As a small business owner servicing the petroleum industry and other , we find that some clients use engineering consultants to manage their projects or maintenance. Some of these consultants use old out dated forms of contract such as GCC 1990 of which we call it a slave/master agreement because of the loads of prejudice. DTI has endorsed much later versions up to 2014 which was amended due to heavy prejudice upon the small contractors . For example you can run out of funds because they can pay you 10% of your rightful claim while you carry extra cost for delays and you are not allowed to stop the works . You must take loans and continue and finish your contract and fight in arbitration which takes years and in the interim your business is facing closure .

If the small business oppose the use of this old apartheid formed contract , he or she will not get awarded work . I am confident that if a survey is taken on all small and medium contractors , I am willing to bet my head on a block that you will get a 100% hit rate on contractors opposing the use of this old and outdated form of contract.

You will hear testimony of small business being forced to write off millions of rands because the 1990 version does not allow you to take a stand against prejudice rulings . If you submit a claim or notice of intent to claim and you receive no response from the engineer? You can consider that rejected with no claim for you or recovery.

The Engineer can pay you throughout the project life cycle and when he feels fit to do so he can conduct a remeasure without warning to you and reject some items that he Already approved and paid you and send an engineer ruling which means you have to pay back what was once approved.
The engineer is also not clearly defined because you can have engineer “ Joe” today and the director of that consultant company can come in at last minute and make a ruling which reverses the first engineer ruling . I cannot see how we as a growing country can allow such small business genocide to happen through the use of this GCC 1990 version .

Trade and Industry must enforce the use of the latest versions of contract and pass legislation to ban the use of GCC 1990 as it was written in 1989 by a group of old government aligned thugs . Some clients have great integrity and have ban the use but other well known refiners continue using this contract because their consultant can guarantee one loser and that is the contractor. Shamefully.

I plead with the Honorables reading this plea to please save our small businesses and stop the use of this poisonous tactical contract that is designed for clients to win and contractors to close doors .

Thanking you in advance for your thoughtfulness and consideration to this request.