AFROSTRUCTURES: Complex Civil Works: Delivered
Richard Long, Director at Afrostructures, tells Enterprise Africa about building, growing, and sustaining an infrastructure and construction firm capable of managing complicated projects through tough market conditions. Today, the company is an industry leader and is excited about future development.
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Interview with Richard Long, Director
The construction sector in South Africa has weathered considerable turbulence in recent years. Rising material costs, skills shortages, infrastructure backlogs and a difficult macroeconomic backdrop all pressed down on the industry through 2024 and into 2025. Yet the horizon is clearing. The sector created 130,000 new jobs in the third quarter of 2025 alone, according to Statistics South Africa — nearly half of all new jobs nationwide during that period. Government has confirmed public-sector infrastructure spending will exceed R1 trillion over the medium term. Research anticipates the South African construction industry will grow by 2.8% in real terms in 2026, with an average annual growth rate of 4.3% expected from 2027 to 2030, supported by investments in industrial infrastructure, energy and transport. For a company like Afrostructures, which has been building the country’s infrastructure since 1982, the timing of that recovery could not be more welcome.
Headquartered in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, Afrostructures is a multi-disciplinary civil engineering and infrastructure contractor with 75 permanent employees and a contracting workforce that extends to around 350 on active projects. Founded more than four decades ago, the company has grown steadily from its roots in infrastructure development to encompass water and sewerage infrastructure — an expanding focus over the past decade — and, more recently, road infrastructure.
Director Richard Long grew up inside the industry before growing up inside the company. “My father was in the industry, and I remember running up and down the stone stockpiles on sites as a child — that lead me into construction,” he says. It is the kind of connection to the work that shapes how a business is run.
The company’s structure drives a deliberate philosophy: experienced leadership staying close to the work. Rather than a layered management hierarchy that distances the senior team from project delivery, Afrostructures operates with a direct approach at every level.
“We have a much more hands-on approach from senior management,” says Long. “We don’t have a layered management structure, and the top level is very involved in the day-to-day running of all of the projects. With the years of experience in that senior management, assisting, mentoring, and motivating the junior staff is something that really separates us from others.”
For a sector where the ILO market systems analysis of South African construction identified skills shortages and poor mentorship as among the most significant structural constraints on quality delivery, a company built around exactly those principles carries a real competitive advantage.
The projects on the Afrostructures portfolio demonstrate what that advantage produces in practice.
Civil works for tank installations at Richards Bay — part of the Bidvest Tank Terminals development at one of South Africa’s most active bulk liquid handling ports — placed the company in a demanding industrial environment where precision and reliability were prerequisites.
New water pipeline systems across KwaZulu-Natal extended the company’s water infrastructure credentials at a time when the national water crisis has made investment in bulk water supply one of the most urgent priorities in South African public infrastructure. The Mandlakazi Bulk Water Supply Scheme — Upstream Bulk Section 1A — is one such project, delivering a bulk water supply system that serves communities in rural KwaZulu-Natal and speaks directly to the government’s infrastructure investment mandate.
BRIDGES AND ROADS
Bridge construction represents another significant area of demonstrated capability. The Shallcross Road Bridge and Phoenix Road Bridge — both in the eThekwini Municipality — involved the construction of new bridge structures in active urban environments, with all the coordination challenges that entails around traffic management, existing services and community impact. The EB Cloete Bridges extended that footprint further. These are not small neighbourhood crossings. Bridge projects in dense municipal areas demand rigorous engineering, careful scheduling and a supply chain that can deliver quality materials to site on time, every time.
“We have completed a number of high-profile, regionally-significant projects and our brand continues to grow across the industry,” Long says.
The Prospecton Canal upgrade in eThekwini added further complexity to the portfolio — a project involving sheet piling lateral support, cofferdam and dewatering, demolition of existing concrete and canal reconstruction. Sheet piling and dewatering in particular require specialist knowledge and equipment, and the ability to deliver these within an active municipal infrastructure environment is a marker of the kind of contractor that larger clients and consulting engineers seek out for difficult work.
The pipeline of forthcoming recognition reflects the cumulative weight of this project history. “With the expected short-term commencement of several new projects, provincially and nationally for major road, infrastructure and water projects, the business outlook is optimistic,” Long confirms.
The supply chain that sits behind this work is managed with the same directness that characterises the company’s approach to project leadership. Afrostructures draws on material suppliers, sub-contractors and professional services, and expects all of them to work to a standard that mirrors what the company expects of itself.
“We rely on a range of entities to perform professionally and to a quality standard,” Long says. “It can be hard to find strong companies who share the values of quality delivery, but we are very clear that companies need to work together effectively.”
BEE compliance is carefully considered in all partnership decisions, and communication standards are non-negotiable. “You have to be able to communicate across all levels. We expect our suppliers to deliver a product or material, and they expect us to pay for it, so we must have strong communication or trust breaks down,” he adds.
PEOPLE AND PRINCIPLES
The greatest test Long identifies is not technical — it is human. “People management is one of the biggest challenges. A company is only as strong as the individuals within it. Their commitment, experience, honesty and integrity is the base of what we offer, and we spend a lot of time managing people to execute the work that we put in front of them.”
That challenge is not unique to Afrostructures. In 2025, 38% of South African employers struggled to find engineers, up from 23% in 2024 and just 14% in 2018 — a trajectory that signals a deepening structural problem across the sector. ILO research of the South African construction market has underlined the skills deficit as one of the most critical constraints on the sector’s ability to deliver quality work at scale, particularly at the level of certified artisans and professional staff.
Afrostructures’ response is embedded in the culture rather than written in a policy. The open-door management model that Long describes — senior people available and actively engaged — is precisely the environment that retains experienced staff and develops the next generation. He is clear about where the real work of the company happens: “It’s not the big headline decisions that have the real impact. It’s the small decisions that each individual makes every day that result in the biggest impact. We certainly rely on our staff and many of them have been with us for decades. We look to them to produce the best quality, and management remains hands-on with an open-door policy to provide assistance whenever it is required, not just when it is asked for.”
South Africa’s construction sector is returning to growth. The government’s infrastructure commitments, the renewable energy buildout and the water and roads backlogs that need addressing all point to sustained demand for exactly the kind of contractor Afrostructures has spent more than 40 years becoming. The awards the company anticipates, the projects it has delivered across KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, and the senior team that still walks the sites and knows every element of the work — these are the foundations on which the next chapter of Afrostructures will be built. In an industry where quality is always the differentiator, that is a considerable advantage.