RECENT TRENDS AND ISSUES ON THE CONCRETE INDUSTRY IN EAST AFRICA

S.O. Ekolua and W. Balu-Tabaarob School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, WITS 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa. Department of Geological Survey and Mines, Mineral Dressing Laboratory, P.O. Box 9, Entebbe, Uganda. ABSTRACT This paper presents some recent trends for the concrete industry in East Africa while highlighting some issues of interest. Data shows a significant steady growth in cement consumption indicating a continuous increase in use of concrete in general construction and infrastructure. Only few national standard specifications and methods have so far been formulated for concrete and concrete materials. Concrete design codes used in the region are foreign-based codes as there are no national structural design codes. Issues of seismic safety and seismic design codes pose a major challenge to the engineering community following recent incidents of destructive earthquake occurrences. The industry itself is fragmented, limited on concrete research while concrete in structures is generally perceived to be of poor quality. Incidents of recent fatal failures in concrete construction might have risen from problems associated with the fundamentals of concrete.
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1.0 INTRODUCTION Interest in concrete appears to be growing on the platform of its expected significant contribution towards improved social well-being and healthy economies in developing countries. Concrete being the main material for residential construction and physical infrastructure presently takes on more significance in developing countries due to the expected protracted growth in demand for physical infrastructure, industrial growth, and general construction (CERF). The three mainland countries of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania including the coastal islands of Pemba and Zanzibar form the East African (E.A) region. The E.A sea coast is about 1,960 km of Kenyan and Tanzanian borders along the Indian Ocean. The region covers a total surface area of 1.8 million square kilometers and currently has a total population estimate of about 100 million, the distribution being approximately 28 million for Uganda, 34 million for Kenya and 38 million for Tanzania. Since 1917, there has existed a framework of inter-governmental cooperation between the three countries that has developed over the past years, despite some drawbacks, culminating into the present E.A Community. Through out the last 10 years, the economies have shown sustained growth with manufacturing, mining and construction sectors contributing substantially to the gross domestic product (Yager, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c).

The region lies within the Great Rift Valley running thousands of kilometers from Syria in the North to Mozambique in the South. In East Africa, the rift valley forks into the Eastern rift running through Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and the Western rift running through the Rwenzori mountainous range in Western Uganda bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Recent seismic activity in the region has attracted significant interest from the engineering community with regard to construction materials and design codes, especially in Western Uganda and Tanzania. Several concerns need to be addressed for concrete to continue evolving in the region as to effectively meet current and future construction demands. At present, knowledge of the various local materials for use in concrete is limited. Appropriate standards are lacking while the technology transfer mechanism for the industry is weak. Concrete research is limited and there is the problem of expertise on concrete. The need for low cost housing materials and designs, sustainability in concrete construction, greenhouse gas effects, waste disposal and other environmental concerns, marine exposure conditions along the sea coast, are all important issues. In this paper, recent trends and developments are explored for the concrete industry in the region. Data and information availability has been quite limiting. As a result, the information in this article might not be as complete and current as desirable.

2.0 CONCRETE IN CONSTRUCTION A majority of the permanent residential housing and commercial buildings in the region are built of reinforced concrete (R.C) construction, mostly low to medium story buildings. The typical R.C. building type is the column and beam construction, with concrete floor slabs, masonry wall partitions and cladding. At city suburbs and the countryside, semi-permanent single and double storied residential buildings are the dominant form of housing. These are slowly replacing houses built using traditional materials that are still prevalent in the rural areas. Concrete is also used on major government infrastructure projects involving construction of pavements, bridges and dams. Typically, construction is labour intensive which might be considered appropriate given the high employment rate, existing cheap labour, and simultaneous lack of the expensive construction equipment. Precast concrete is limited to masonry, concrete pipes, roofing tiles and similar products but large-scale precasting of structural concrete is not common. A vast majority of concrete construction is cast-in-situ. Concrete making ingredients are mixed on site then concrete is cast in place. Ready-mix concrete operations are small, few and limited to major cities.

3.0 CONCRETE MATERIALS 3.1 Cement Consumption Altogether, there are eight cement producers in the E.A region with a combined annual capacity of 4.5 million metric tonnes (Mt). Kenya has three cement manufacturers with a total capacity of 2.77 Mt/year:- Bamburi Cement Ltd, East African Portland Cement Co. (EAPC) Ltd and Athi River Mining Ltd, each controlling the domestic market share of 60%, 34% and 6% respectively (Evenett, 2004). Uganda has two producers with a total production capacity of 0.52 Mt/year:Tororo Cement Industries Ltd (TCI) located in the East and Hima Cement Ltd in Western Uganda. Tanzanias cement production capacity of 1.25 Mt/year is from three cement producers:- Mbeya Cement Co. Ltd, Tanga Cement Co. Ltd (TCC) owned by Holcim and Tanzanian Portland Cement Co. Ltd (TPCC) owned by Hieldelberger Group (Evenett, 2004). The eight companies formed the East African Cement Producers Association (EACPA) in 2001, and these companies have a market share of 100% in Kenya, 100% in Uganda and 62% in Tanzania (Evenett, 2004). A relatively small amount of cement is exported to the neighbouring countries of Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Southern Sudan while cement imports have been sourced from Egypt and India. Almost all the cement producers belong to large international cement companies with Larfarge having ownership in five of the eight cement companies:- Hima Cement Ltd, Bamburi Cement Ltd, EAPC, Mbeya Cement Co. and partownership of Athi River Mining Ltd. Larfarge controls about 60% of the E.A cement market share, Hieldelberger Group 8%, Holcim 4% and TCI, an independent company has 15% of the market share. The impact of such consolidation in the cement industry is two fold:- firstly, cement producers might tend to avoid price competition among themselves and fight against cement imports by fixing cement prices in the domestic market. For developing countries, such a practice would be unfortunate in the struggle against poverty and affordability of housing as cement is the most expensive concrete making ingredient. Organized price fixing cannot allow cement prices to fall to the lowest levels that would be possible through competition, making it difficult for the poor majority to afford the product. The other problem associated with market consolidation is that cement giants, having established a foothold in the domestic markets will tend to fight smallscale producers and new entrants into the market so as to eliminate them (Evenett, 2004). Eventually, cement production becomes solely the business of few established large companies while the small to medium enterprises which generally employ the majority of the population, might not easily participate. In 2004, the total cement consumption in the region was 2.3 Mt compared to 1.55 Mt in 1999 (Yager 2000a, 2000b, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c). Uganda and Tanzania showed steady growth in cement consumption for the last 10 years as shown in Figure 1. In Kenya, cement consumption declined from 1996 to 2001 before gaining steady growth thereafter. Since 1999, growth in cement consumption has particularly been significant. This has been attributed to increase in demand from large construction projects, infrastructure projects, and development of gold mines mostly found in Tanzania.

3.2 Aggregates Mining of aggregates for use in concrete as crushed stone, sand, and hardcore generally follows the trend of growth in use of concrete for construction. In Uganda, gneiss, granite, quartzite and sandstone are found in the areas of Western Uganda mostly from precambrian basement rocks. Dolerite and amphibole occur in Central and Eastern Uganda. There are about five companies producing crushed stone at medium and large scale capacities. In Tanzania, documented consumption of stone aggregate increased remarkably from 20 Mt in 2002 to 108 Mt in 2003 and 120 Mt in 2004, while sand usage quadrupled from 0.5 Mt in 2002 to 2 Mt in 2003 (Yager 2004b). It is may be noted that aggregate mining provides self-employment for many small-scale and individual miners including women and families, mostly the semi-skilled and unskilled.

Figure 1 Trend of Cement Consumption in East Africa (Yager 2000a, 2000b, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c)

3.3 Pozzolanic Materials E.A countries are endowed with a variety of pozzolans from natural sources and also from various wastes:- agro-wastes, mine wastes and industrial wastes. Kenya and Uganda are primarily agricultural economies and generated a lot of agro-wastes, and also have vast construction clays. Potential artificial pozzolans include burnt clays and reject bricks, blastfurnace slag from steel production, rice husks, sugar bagasse. Tanzania is the only country in the region with known coal deposits. Future exploitation of the coal mines can be expected to produce fly ash as an industrial by-product for use as pozzolan. But the abundant sources of pozzolans are from natural deposits. The volcanic rocks in the region provide abundant deposits of volcanic ashes and tuffs with pozzolanic properties. In Uganda, volcanic ash deposits are in Kisoro, Kabale, Bushenyi and Fort Portal in the West while volcanic tuffs occur in Eastern parts of the country at the slopes of Mt. Elgon and in Karamoja. Both cement companies in the country currently exploit the volcanic materials as cementititious mineral admixtures in their products marketed as portland-pozzolan cement. Other sources of natural pozzolans found in the country are diatomite, vermiculite and metakaolin (Mills and Hooton, 1992; Tabaaro, 2000). Fine grained volcanic ash and white pumice are two common forms of natural pozzolans found in Tanzania. The pozzolans are located primarily in the two areas surrounding Mt. Kilimanjaro and Meru in the North-East, and around Mt Ngozi and Rungwe of Mbeya region in the south. In the 1970s and 1980s attempts were made to utilize these pozzolans for small scale, low-cost lime-pozzolan cement production. Unfortunately this program ceased. Only recently was industrial use of the pozzolans re-ignited, being exploited by Mbeya Cement Company for production of portland-pozzolan cement (Olekambainei, 2005). Figure 1 shows the combine use of pozzolans in Uganda and Tanzania in the recent years, mainly from cement manufacturing activity. The production strongly increased over the past years. Generally, use of the vast naturally occurring pozzolans in cement appears to be on the rise but their use does not seem to alleviate cement costs as the materials are being exploited and marketed primarily for commercial gains. Consequently, the optimism that use of the existing deposits of natural pozzolans could alleviate cement costs and increase cement affordability is vanishing.

4.0 CONCRETE TECHNOLOGY AND THE INDUSTRY INFRASTRUCTURE 4.1 Standards and Design Codes The standards for concrete materials and structural concrete are product specifications, test methods and design codes. Some of these evolve over several years of experiences and concerted research requiring sophiscated equipment. In most developing countries, concrete is a relatively new modern material of construction. There is not much historical experience involving concrete use in developing countries. However, the principles and concepts governing concrete are universal and are transferable to different environments.

Figure 2 Growth of Pozzolans Use (Yager 2004b; 2004c) The three national standards institutions:- the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KBS), Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) and Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS) jointly form The East African Standards Bureau for formulation of regional standards. Some few standards have been formulated for concrete: Kenya standards include aggregates (KS 1238, pats 1-16), cement (KS EAS 18, parts 1 & 2; KS EAS 183, KS 1393), reinforcement steel (KS 02-106) and several standards on concrete and concrete products; Ugandan standards have so far been formulated for aggregates (US 144-146), cement (US 100, parts 1 to 7); Tanzanian standards exist for aggregates, cement, concrete, steel. Foreign-based design codes:- the European, American, and Asian codes are mostly used in reinforced concrete design as there are no locally based structural design codes. British design codes (CP 114, CP 110, BS 8110) are widely used in design practice.

4.2 Concrete Research Infrastructure exists through different institutions with facilities for concrete testing. UNBS, KBS, TBS, Materials labs of Ugandas Ministry of Works have such facilities. These institutions conducted testing mainly for quality control purposes. It is important here to distinguish between testing and research and the roles each of them play in the industry. Testing is an evaluation of properties and behaviour for conformance to required specifications. In research, the intent is to gain new knowledge and insights. Research is essential to innovation and development, and might be the antidote to retrogression.

As in many other parts of the world, universities are usually better focussed towards research. The civil engineering departments at universities of Makerere, Dar es Salaam and Nairobi have basic infrastructure for concrete research but are not well-equipped and lack research funds. Few other government laboratories are equipped to conduct effective materials research including the Mineral Dressing laboratory of the Department of Geological Survey and Mines in Uganda, Building Research Centre of The Ministry of Housing in Kenya. In the Mineral Dressing lab, extensive materials research has been conducted on pozzolans and composites for potential use in concrete (Mills and Hooton, 1992; Tabaaro, 2000; Tabaaro 2004). The sources of research funding are usually government and industry. However, research institutions often lack research funding. Most local industries in the region lack the commitment to fund local research and innovation. The concrete industry as well faces these problems and current concrete research is minimal and simply basic. With recent privatization of most concrete-related industries especially the cement manufacturing plants, the industry needs to take a share of responsibility to provide necessary support to research in concrete through various means. This, if for nothing else, should promote growth of the concrete market in the region. The need for concrete research is great:- Development of alternative local materials for use in concrete including pozzolans, natural fibres etc. for greening and affordability of concrete; Avoidance of harmful waste disposal by promoting its use in concrete; Development of appropriate concrete technologies rather than reliance on importation of expensive technologies; Provision of continuous training on the fundamentals and advances in concrete technology; Research and innovations required to meet local needs such as alleviation of poor housing in the countries; Concrete design codes and standards.

4.3 The Industry Framework Concrete industry is a complex network of multiple players including suppliers and manufacturers of construction materials, contractors, architects and engineers, labour personnel and artisans, research and academic institutions, government. Coordinating structures are essential for proper functioning and advancement of the industry. Presently, concrete industry in E.A is fragmented. Although there are some professional and industry-based associations such as the EACPA, the concrete industry still needs an appropriate coordinating framework. In other countries, frameworks such as the Concrete Society of Southern Africa, American Concrete Institute and several others play a significant role to protect the industry from mere transplanting of technologies from other countries and support development of specifications and design codes for durable concrete along with parallel systems for quality assurance. A similar approach might be needed in the E.A concrete industry to advance concrete technology in region and contribute towards sustainable development.

5.0 ISSUES ON DURABILITY AND DESIGN OF CONCRETE STRUCTURES 5.1 Durability of concrete, Inland and Coastal Marine Conditions E.A mainlands are located at and around the equator and experience two dry and wet seasons in a year. Some northern parts of Kenya and Uganda, and parts of Tanzania are semi-arid. Exposure conditions in the mainlands could be stimulant to carbonation of concrete. Reinforced concrete structures exposed to the marine conditions along the sea coast are likely to be subject to deterioration due to chloride attack. The exposure of reinforced concrete to the combined attack mechanisms of carbonation and chlorides would result in a more severe loss of durability. Other potential durability concerns might include sulphate attack from various sources such as soils, and alkali-aggregate reaction (AAR). Owen fall dams was diagnosed to have suffered AAR damage (Mason and Molyneux, 1998).

5.2 Seismic Activity in the East African Region East Africa is a tectonic region engulfed by the two arms of the Great Rift Valley running through Kenya and Tanzania in the East and through Western Uganda bordering the DRC. Uganda and Tanzania are quite earthquake prone with epicentre locations being found mostly in Western Uganda and many parts of the Tanzanian craton (Rouse, 2005). Indeed, recent incidents of destructive earthquake occurrences have raised the need for earthquake-resistant materials and designs. Ugandas first recorded major earthquake was in 1897. The country experiences destructive earthquakes every 5 to 10 years (DDMR, 2002). But any major earthquake with an epicentre in Uganda, Tanzania or one of the neighbouring countries usually affects the whole E.A region. Some seismic design codes in the region were drafted only recently. Their application and effectiveness towards seismic safety needs a concerted relentless effort (Matovu, 2002). The Uganda Seismic Safety Association also regularly holds conferences every two years.

5.3 Concrete Construction Failures It was seen in Section 2 that there has been significant growth in cement consumption in the region which, disregarding other cement uses and exports, implies an increase in concrete construction. Although an increase in use of concrete in construction and/or increase in press coverage of engineering issues might contribute to the perceptible rise in reported failures, the real concern is about the failure causes. Some of the recent notable concrete construction failures are:A new R.C. 3-story J & M Airport Rd Hotel collapse during construction at Bwebajja Hill, Entebbe Road, Uganda, Sept 2004. Eleven (11) workers were killed and 27 injured (Bogere and Senkabirwa, 2004; UNBS 2004). Collapse of 4-story Building, R. Ngala Street, Nairobi, Kenya, Jan 2006. Thirteen (13) people were killed and several injured (Barasa and Gatheru, 2006).

Both buildings were new R.C structures under construction. Failures seem to have been related to poor workmanship, poor concrete production, inadequate or incompetent supervision, lack of quality control testing, premature removal of formwork (Ekolu and Ballim, 2006). The same causes of failures have been reported in other parts of the continent including Algeria (Kenai et al. 1999). Certainly, there are many other reported and unreported failure incidents in the E.A region that have not been discussed in this paper but these two fatal failures highlight concerns regarding our scientific acquaintance with concrete as a modern construction material in developing countries.

6.0 CONCLUSIONS In the foregone discussion, interesting developments and issues regarding the concrete industry in E.A region have been highlighted. The main drawback has been limited availability of data. Nonetheless, some important trends have been identified. There has been a significant steady growth in cement consumption in the region for the last seven years and this trend is expected to continue. In line with the observed trend, there is parallel increase in production of other concrete materials, especially aggregates and pozzolanic materials. Carbonation, chloride attack under marine exposure conditions at the sea coast, sulphate attack, alkali-aggregate reaction are potential durability problems that may be aggravated by the generally low quality concrete. Absence of national design codes, few standard specifications and testing facilities for concrete, limited research in concrete technology, and fragmented industry framework are some of the hindrances to the technology advancement. Recent construction failures might attest to some of the concerns on concrete technology in the region. Also, the recent incidents of earthquake occurrences continue to threaten livelihoods especially in Western Uganda and Tanzania. The natural disaster raises a significant challenge regarding safety, seismic codes, and guidelines for the earthquake prone areas.

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