Engineering Council to license practitioners
The Engineering Council has announced plans to take robust steps to standardise the education, training and practice of engineering in the country to eliminate quacks.
The move is also to avert disasters triggered by poor professional work and also promote and encourage adoption of professional standards by engineering practitioners and forestall flaws that often aid disasters such as flooding and building failures.
Mr Augustine Kuuire, Board Chairman of the Engineering Council said this when he led a five-member delegation to call on the outgoing General Manager of the Ghana News Agency Mr Bernard Otabil, to discuss public education partnership deal with the country’s newswire service.
He said engineering practitioners, spare parts dealers, firms, licensed bodies and educational units that provide engineering courses would be required to obtain licenses and register under the council.
The Council would keep a register and provide for the discipline of registered engineering practitioners, companies and firms as required by law,
The Council seeks to partner the Agency as the umbrella of the media in the country to help raise public awareness about its functions, existence and activities.
Mr Kuuire said regulating engineering practice would bring sanity in the profession.
“We are going to license all engineering professionals or practitioners right from the engineer down to the craftsman so that each and every practitioner is held responsible at his level of practice.”
“If there is any mishap we can trace it to who committed the error and in that case we will be able to regulate the practice of the engineering in this country.”
Practicing craftsmen without certificates would be required by law to work under a certified craftsman, he said.
“We want to educate the public not to engage people who are not registered with the council, it means they quack.”
Mr Kuuire said the council would work closely with the existing institutions like the Ghana Institution of Engineers and the Institutions of Engineering who would be served as the licensing bodies.
“With the engineering council you have to pass through the licensing body to be licensed and we [the Council] will now register you.”
Mr Otabil lauded the Council members for taken such bold steps to correct problems in the society that create national havoc with the state losing heavily.
He advised members of the council to preserve the provisions in the Act 819, 2011, establishing the council to serve as a guide to practitioners.
“Every now and then engineers have to save us, engineers are shortening distances between countries.
“I believe that the establishment of the council is a way of recognising the need for engineers to do their work appropriately,” he said.
He advised them to go beyond giving mentorship to professionals to include the encouragement for people to be aware that when performing their duties “there is someone right behind them who is going to vet what they are doing”.
“Current happenings in this country need not belaboured in any way because we are all witnesses to what has happened recently,” Mr Otabil said in reference to latest flooding that claimed lives and swept away property worth millions.
The engineering council seeks to attain the highest professional standards in engineering practice for national development.
It aims to effectively promote science, engineering and technology advancement and create confidence within the society through the regulation of the standards of practice and the licensing of institutions and professionals.
Source: GNA