Thatheni is a winning woman in construction

The civil and road construction world is a male dominated environment. So when a woman decides that this is where she wants to earn her crust, her choice of company name – Thatheni Women’s Construction – has left no doubt as to who is running the show.

Thatheni Zondi, along with a female business partner, decided in 1998 to make use of the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Transport’s mentorship programme aptly called ‘Vukuzakhe’, for emerging contracting companies. ‘Vukuzakhe’ means ‘stand up and do it for yourself’.

Her partner has subsequently left the partnership but Zondi has steadily worked her way up through the four mentorship stages of the programme. Her son Thobelani learnt about the business during his school holidays and subsequently joined the business after qualifying as a civil engineer. He tells us more. 

“We’ve been involved in lots of development in especially KwaZulu-Natal building hospitals, schools and housing, but seem to have founded our niche with road construction,” he says. “We used to hire in equipment such as graders, rollers, tractor-loader-backhoes (TLB) and water tankers but this ate into our profit and in 2008, I convinced my mother that buying our own earthmoving equipment would be a sound investment that would bring us more profit.”

Early in 2008, Thatheni Women’s Construction bought a Bell 770D Grader and a Bell 315SJ 4x4 TLB. “Even using hired equipment, we had built a reputation for bringing projects in on time and on budget and owning this equipment gave us the confidence to continue on this path but doing it more profitably as well,” Thobelani Zondi says.

“Our Bell 770D Grader has really been a life-saver as this powerful machine works effortlessly in the hilly areas where we build roads and with a fuel consumption of around 15 litres per hour, no one can complain. The machine has delivered service in excess of 2 000 hours and we can safely say that we profit from maximising its uptime. ”

Thatheni Women’s Construction sees their Bell 315SJ 4x4 TLB as an essential all-purpose machine. It is used for digging trenches for piping and culverts, stockpiling material, loading trucks and doing general housekeeping on their construction sites.

A project to build 3km of new road at Mpendle, west of Howick in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, saw Thatheni Women’s Construction once again turn to Bell Equipment when they saw the need for two rollers, a pad-foot and a smooth-drum machine.

“The high level of service we had enjoyed from Bell Equipment in Pietermaritzburg led us to speak to them directly about the rollers and we bought a Bomag BW-212P4 pad-foot and a similar smooth-drum roller,” Thobelani Zondi adds. “We believe that with our Bell Grader and TLB as well as the Bomag compaction equipment, we are now equipped to tackle any rural road project.”

The successful completion of projects has brought Thatheni Women’s Construction more work and the need for even more equipment saw them buying a Bell 670G Grader in early 2010. At the time of writing, this machine was working on a road project near Eshowe.

“I feel we must mention that our Bell machines are all serviced by technicians from Bell Equipment’s Customer Service Centre in Pietermaritzburg,” Thobelani Zondi adds. “Bell Equipment’s response times are excellent and the whole experience, from dealing with Ralph Wortmann on the sales side to Darren Couzens on product support, has been a pleasant one.”

“We have to look further into the future at milling machines and pavers, but whatever we do you can bet that Bell Equipment will be part of our plans.”