What the Tsavo lions can teach us about our construction industry

I can hear you all already: “Lions? Tsavo? What the heck is he on about this time?”

To which, as always, I reply: “Patience, friends! It may take a while to get to our destination; but – like the Kenya-Uganda Railway, built by the British in 1898 – this digression is going somewhere, promise!”

And with that out of the way: let’s begin our time-travelling adventure, shall we?

Our first stop is the Tsavo river-valley in eastern Kenya, 1898. It seems that the British Colonial Government had this wonderful idea of connecting Uganda to the Indian Ocean by means of a railway: a project which involved, inter alia, building a bridge across the river Tsavo.

You may already be familiar with what happened next, as the incident was made into a (not-very-good) movie in 1998: ‘The Ghost and the Darkness’, starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas.

But to give you a rough idea: in the end, the bridge took around nine months longer to complete, than originally planned… for the simple reason that workers kept getting themselves devoured by lions – only TWO (2) lions, please note – until a point was reached where the entire project had to temporarily shelved.

That’s right, folks: incredible as this may sound, the entire march of British Colonial progress in Africa – at a time, when the British Empire was arguably at its zenith – was halted abruptly in its tracks, by nothing more than a couple of mangy old cats, in a remote, dusty corner of Eastern Kenya.

Even more incredible, however, was the sheer scale of devastation left in their wake. Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson – the man who eventually killed the two man-eaters – claimed that their victims literally ‘ran into the hundreds’. Modern estimates, however, suggest that the death-toll was closer to a more modest (and certainly more believable) ‘28-31’.

But there was more to the problem, than just the number of casualties. As time wore on, the two lions grew ever bolder. It may have started out as ‘one or two workers disappearing, every other week’… but it quickly grew into an almost daily occurrence: with the lions sometimes dragging their victims out of their tents; and eating them right there, in the middle of the camp itself (seemingly oblivious to rifle-fire).

As you can imagine, this situation also proved highly embarrassing, to an Empire which still called itself ‘GREAT Britain’, at the time. In a nutshell: something had to be done about those dratted lions… and fast!

And indeed something WAS done… but I’ll come back to that later, as otherwise we’d miss our next stop: Malta, in 2024… where we are likewise hounded by an epidemic of construction-related fatalities: only involving ‘collapsing buildings’, instead of ‘man-eating lions’.

[Note: From the perspective of those who’ve already lost their lives, however… it matters little if Death took the form of a ‘wild animal attack’, or (quite literally, in some cases) ‘a tonne of bricks.’  The effects are just as fatal, either way...]

But back to contemporary Malta. This week, two Albanian construction-workers were grievously injured, when the ceiling of an adjacent house collapsed after (for reasons that remain somewhat unclear) they ‘jumped onto it from next-door’.

Mercifully, the workers themselves survived the ordeal (albeit badly hurt)… and the residential home that was demolished, happened to be devoid of human inhabitants at the time.

But others have been less fortunate. Just a couple of weeks ago, another Albanian construction worker – Bari Balla – became the latest fatality in a spate of comparable accidents: which also claimed the life of Jean Paul Sofia last year; Miriam Pace, in 2020; and an arguably unquantifiable number of (overwhelmingly foreign) construction workers, over the past few decades.

Ah, but… how much does the Malta scenario really have in common with Tsavo: beyond, of course, the fact that they both involve ‘accidental deaths/injuries on construction sites’?

To answer that, we must briefly return to 19th century Kenya. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of those two lions’ (recorded) victims, were Indian nationals who had been brought over to Africa specifically for that one project.

And this, in turn, raises another question: considering that Britain controlled enormous swathes of Africa, at the time: why did they have to go as far afield as India, to find workers for this particular job? Why did they not just recruit their workforce, from the local, indigenous populations of Kenya, Uganda, etc.?

Well… it turns out that those local, indigenous workers just didn’t WANT to work on that Tsavo bridge. The East-Kenyans, in particular, knew full-well that the area was simply too dangerous…. but even workers brought in from other parts of Africa were quick to assess the risk.

In practice, this meant that – with every fresh attack – the work-camps lost not just the lions’ actual victims … but also, around two-thirds of the local work-force, who simply deserted the place in droves.

It was to fill these vacancies that Britain was forced to employ hundreds (if not thousands) of workers from India. And while those Indians were no doubt familiar with the specific dangers of working in their own homeland… they were hopelessly unprepared, and ill-equipped, to read all the ‘warning signs’ in their new, unfamiliar environment.

Now: admittedly, much of what I’m about to say hinges on more than a century’s worth of hindsight… but looking back, it is safe to say that many (if not most) of those fatalities could have been avoided.

For instance: even the fact that most local workers refused employment in Tsavo, to begin with – and the few who accepted, always left - should have been enough to alert the Colonial authorities to the scale of the problem they were facing. Similarly, it should have occurred to them that – by replacing experienced local workers, with inexperienced foreign labour – they were effectively just ‘ringing the dinner bell, for any hungry lion within a radius of around 20 miles…’

But, oh well. Hindsight is, alas, a commodity which is never actually there, when you need it the most. So much so, that…

… well, just take a closer look at the details of the latest building-collapse here in Malta, and see for yourselves.

Earlier, I hinted that the collapsed home had ‘fortuitously’ been empty.… but it turns out that: “The elderly owners of [the house] had moved out of their home in recent months for fear of becoming Malta's latest construction victims”.

One family member even said: "My father was scared, he said he did not want to end up like Miriam Pace” [who, let’s face it, had died under almost IDENTICAL circumstances, to last Friday’s collapse].

Now: I’ll grant you that my Tsavo analogy may not always hold up, 100%… but I think we can all agree that there are certain ‘commonalities’, between the two scenarios.

For instance: just like the 19th century British Colonial government, the Maltese construction industry is clearly finding it difficult (assuming it is even trying) to hire local workers for their construction projects. And they, too, have filled the vacancies with foreign labour.

Now: it would be facile, of course, to suggest that Maltese workers shun the construction sector, because they are somehow more ‘aware’ of the risks involved, than their foreign counterparts. Likewise, it would be ridiculous to argue that foreign workers are in any way ‘incapable’ of perceiving the danger of an imminent building collapse, etc.

No, there are obviously other reasons (involving ‘aspirations’, ‘quality of life’, etc.) to account for the situation. But it cannot escape notice that the vast majority of construction-related fatalities have indeed been foreigners… and the question, in their case, becomes: ‘What choice do these people – who overwhelmingly come from (no offence, or anything) extremely poor parts of the world - really have: other than to face those risks, or remain penniless forever?’

Much as I hate to say it: the same old ‘exploitation’ issues that dogged the Tsavo workforce – where the authorities clearly valued company profits, above human life – apply to 21st century Malta, too.

Then, there’s the issue of foresight. To put this as simply as I can: if even an ‘elderly Maltese couple’ could clearly ‘read the warning signs’ [Note: a little hard not to, really, when they consist in ‘great big cracks and holes, opening up in your own home’s ceiling’] … how on earth was the same danger not equally visible to (inter alia) the PA/BCA/OHSA officials who were supposed to be inspecting the site; the architect who designed the project; the site-manager; the contractor… not to mention and all the other entities/authorities that were involved in its approval, and supervision?

Clearly, the answer cannot be – as it was, in the case of the Tsavo lions – because those people are not ‘experienced’, or ‘knowledgeable’ enough, to recognise those warning signs when they actually see them.

Equally clearly, however: the answer can only be that they must have ‘disregarded’  (for want of a better word) all the times that the hapless Floriana family had tried to alert them to those very dangers. Or as one member put it: “Our architect spoke with the BCA and other authorities, but never got anywhere.”

Coming back to our Tsavo analogy, then… how did the British colonial authorities eventually solve their ‘man-eating lion problem’, anyway? Once again, the answer is simple. They finally listened to the advice of local tribesmen (whose families had been hunting lions for generations)… and hired a team of experienced Masai trackers/warriors, to assist Patterson in the hunt.

Now: there’s a lesson in there somewhere, waiting to be learnt by Malta’s local construction industry/regulators. All that remains, I suppose, is to count how many more people have to die, before that lesson finally sinks in.