financial stakeholder manager, you would need to be able to speak to and read the financials of the company. In the absence of getting a technical stakeholder specialist, we’ve done what we call streamlining stakeholder. Each business unit in a company is responsible for knowing about its stakeholders and a stakeholder manager sews together all the stakeholder efforts of the organisation. His/her role is to pull together a stakeholder strategy from all the business units and then run with it. In an ideal situation, material needs to be prepared by the stakeholder manager, because you want to put across information that is easy for people to understand and easy to convey. Being a stakeholder manager is about translating the business speak.

SANRAL projects take a really long time to plan and build. At what stage does the stake-holder engagement happen? From inception. When a project is proposed within the agency, the stakeholder manager would need to ask several questions: why do we think the structure would work at the proposed location? Have we made a thorough needs analysis?

What happens when what the community needs from an infrastructure perspective and what they want are different things? That would be very difficult. To navigate that, SANRAL has set up Project Liaison Committees (PLCs), made up of community leaders, local business people and investors, who then take part in stakeholder engagements.

What are stakeholder engagements? They are sessions where members of the local community with particular interests in the project can learn about it and voice their concerns. Members of the PLC live in the community that will be affected by a

proposed project. They are community leaders who speak the language and know the challenges. SANRAL’s stakeholder managers go through a troubleshooting exercise with them and a craft solution that benefits everybody.

We build national infrastructure. Are SANRAL’s stakeholders the general public? Yes. Roads cut across many sectors– road safety, finance, SMME development, job creation etc. Any person who travels from Musina to Cape Town via a national route is affected by our work. There is a need for us to engage continuously the people we do work for, but also who enable us to do work.

Who else is a SANRAL stakeholder? The government is one. Business is another. NGOs with particular mandates, such as AA (Automobile Association) and an NGO called Global Road Safety Partnership South Africa. Other than the public, our stakeholders range from politics and business to financing and the Department of Basic Education.

What do you need to be a stakeholder manager? Stakeholder management as a profession found many people who were doing the work already and got absorbed into stakeholder positions. But lately, there are formal courses at universities that companies require you to have completed for you to be called a stakeholder co-ordinator or manager.

What should the general public know about stakeholder management? It’s a difficult job. To do it, you have to be a people-person and you have to manage expectations – all the time. A lot of what stakeholder managers do has to do with listening, then responding. We listen, we strategise and we come back and say: this is how we’re moving forward.