Globally, falls from height remain the single largest cause of construction-related deaths. It’s a statistic that feels distant until you see what’s happening on the ground.
I was driving through the Eastern Cape recently when something on a construction site left me speechless. A warehouse was going up, steel frame exposed, nothing unusual there.
Here’s the part that left me puzzled: workers walking along the structure, balancing several metres above the ground, with no harnesses in sight. No visible fall protection.
The unsettling part is how normal it looked. Perhaps because in many parts of the continent, it is.
We don’t talk much about scaffolding. It’s not the finished building, and it’s not the architecture that gets photographed or posted online. It’s temporary, functional and almost invisible to anyone who isn’t involved.
Look up at the Cape Town or Sandton skyline, and you will see a temporary skeletal labyrinth of steel hugging the sides of burgeoning high-rises. The structures are the lifeblood of urban development, yet they represent one of the most high-stakes environments in the construction sector.
South Africa is building up. Higher buildings, denser urban nodes, more complex developments. As the ambition grows, so does the reliance on scaffolding to support it.
But there is more to scaffolding than just putting up metal poles and planks. There’s engineering, physics and precision.
A fully erected scaffold around a tall tower can run to many kilometres of tubing and weigh hundreds of tonnes, effectively a second, temporary building wrapped around the permanent one.
In places like Hong Kong, it’s a showcase of precision. They use bamboo scaffolding; skilled rattan workers can erect it several times faster than steel, making it the only major city in the world that still uses bamboo in skyscrapers. But when it goes wrong, it goes wrong fast.
Most residential and commercial projects operate at heights between 15m and 30m. That comes with risk.
But in South Africa, particularly on large industrial builds or major urban developments, scaffolding often reaches 60m to 100m or more.
Wind becomes a factor, and load calculations become critical. Materials behave differently under pressure. The margin for error disappears. Yet, the industry operates in a constant push-and-pull between safety and speed. Because construction timelines are tight, budgets are fixed, and delays are expensive.
In 2015, scaffolding collapsed in Sandton during the construction of the Grayston Drive pedestrian bridge. The temporary structure fell onto the M1 highway during peak-hour traffic. Two people were killed, and 19 others were injured.
In the middle of last year, there was a scaffolding collapse at a shopping centre in Springfield Park, Durban. The workers were 6m high and were installing signage when the structure failed, and they fell.
One construction worker died, and four others were injured.
Incidents like this are often the result of something being skipped, rushed or underestimated, which leads to a missed calculation, overlooked inspection or a decision made under pressure.
In a sector where people are working at height, those decisions carry consequences that can’t be undone.
Hassan Suleman, the owner of Form Force Scaffolding, said: “At height, scaffolding stops being a temporary structure and becomes a primary risk system. You’re no longer just building access, you’re engineering stability under constantly changing conditions – wind, load, human movement. The biggest mistake we see in the industry is treating scaffolding as secondary to the build.
“It’s not. If the scaffold fails, everything fails. That’s why if it’s not engineered properly for the exact conditions on that site, it doesn’t go up. No deadline is worth overriding that.”
Form Force Scaffolding has a 100% safety record with no fatalities.
Suleman said safety wasn’t a department or a checklist. It was a culture that ran through every level of the operation.
On its sites, anyone could raise a concern and stop work if something didn’t feel right. Engineering standards were not flexible, depending on deadlines or budgets. “Because once you start bending those rules, you don’t know where it ends.”
There is a portion of the market operating on the basis of undercutting. Contractors who win work by submitting the lowest quote often do so by cutting the things that keep workers safe: fewer inspections, lower-grade materials and less experienced teams.
Insurance premiums for high-risk construction work have increased significantly in recent years. Insurers are watching the sector closely, and South Africa has had enough incidents to raise concern. That cost gets passed down the chain.
Material costs don’t sit still either. SANS-compliant steel is tied to global markets and a volatile rand. A project priced months in advance can quickly become unprofitable by the time construction starts.
Then there’s the skills gap.
Highly experienced riggers and supervisors are in short supply. Many of the most skilled professionals in this space have decades of experience, yet there isn’t a strong enough pipeline of talent coming through behind them. The same people are stretched across multiple projects, carrying a level of responsibility that’s difficult to sustain.
This creates an environment where cutting corners becomes tempting.
The irony is that the most important part of scaffolding is the part no one sees. It’s the planning, engineering drawings, the load calculations and daily inspections.
The repetitive checks that take place long before anyone climbs the structure. When the discipline of the above slips, the entire system becomes vulnerable.
South Africa needs a stronger training pipeline for scaffolding and rigging. More accredited programmes and more practical, on-site mentorship. A clearer path for workers to move from entry-level roles into skilled, certified positions.
Then there is enforcement, which is something we struggle to get right across many departments in South Africa. We have regulations.
The Occupational Health and Safety Act and SANS standards are solid, but the issue is consistency. Enforcement needs to be visible and unavoidable, especially for repeat offenders who continue to operate outside the rules.
There is also some responsibility that should be put onto the client.
Developers and contractors continue to award work to the lowest bidder without properly interrogating safety records, methodologies and compliance; the cycle continues. As always in construction, cheap becomes expensive quickly when something goes wrong.
As South Africa continues to build upward, scaffolding will remain the silent partner in the growth. It won’t feature in the brochures, and it won’t be the selling point. Yet it’s always there, holding everything together while the real work happens.
A message Suleman drives home is that the temporary structures might be temporary, but the consequences of getting it wrong are permanent. We don’t see scaffolding when a building is finished; it disappears, as if it had never been there.
As we keep pushing our skylines higher, the real measure of progress won’t be how tall we build; it will be whether every person who went up came back down alive and uninjured.
Opinion piece by Ash Müller
