Professionals in all disciplines should pay more than a passing interest in the ongoing battle for terrain between engineers and estate surveyors and valuers. It concerns professional boundaries, the scope and limitations of practice as well as changing norms regarding barriers to entry. It is also at base a battle for the Naira and Kobo in the specific area.
Those new to the issue will benefit from a recap. The terrain of contestation is what the engineers in Nigeria call “engineering valuation”. It traditionally resided in the portfolio of those who by their professional designations everyone knows as estate surveyors and valuers. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, engineers began to eye the market and the opportunities in the area.
Surveyors and valuers traditionally carried out valuation. Valuation is ordinarily “an estimation of the worth of something, especially one carried out by a professional valuer.” The valuer professionally interprets the monetary value of tangible and intangible assets. Significant valuation areas are in business (finance) and construction or property. One area of property valuation involves assessing plant, equipment and machinery PEM). The equipment and machinery aspect often involved checking the integrity of those assets.
In 2018, Nigerian engineers under the aegis of the Council of Registered Engineers of Nigeria convinced Power, Works and Housing Minister Babatunde Raji Fashola of the need to carve out the valuation of plant and machinery exclusively for them. Government Notice 91 of 31 July 2018 carried the signature of Fashola on the Gazette bearing the COREN-Regulations for Engineering Appraisal/Evaluation. ”Federal Legislation on Engineering Valuation” established engineers trained explicitly for the purpose as fit and capable to handle engineering valuation. They got three gazettes!
Since 1989 engineers had sought to carve out this slice of the valuation practice market. The Nigerian Society of Engineers petitioned against the report of the Consultative Assembly on what became the Companies and Allied Matters Act seeking specific mention of engineering valuation. They pursued the matter and succeeded in getting an amendment. COREN says that Decree No 46 of 1991 “made for the inclusion of engineers in the definition of the valuer in Section 137”.
According to COREN, engineering appraisal/valuation is “an art of entrenching the value of specific properties where professional engineering knowledge and judgement are essential. Such properties include mines, factories, buildings, plant and machinery, industrial plants, public utilities, engineering constructions etc.”
Valuers argue that valuation involves much more than technical parameters. It is a holistic assessment of the rights that inhere in a property for the owner and takes in legal, commercial, market data and macroeconomic indicators. Property valuation attracts professionals in the built environment field including architects, surveyors, engineers, and extends to lawyers, accountants and finance experts.
It is one of those fields that calls for interdisciplinary collaboration with the surveyor as a lead. Engineers in Nigeria want to lead the field and corner a significant slice of the market.
The Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers was somnolent. They did not react to the efforts of the engineers to take a significant slice of the market, even after the issuance of the 2018 gazette until COREN started reaching out to Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government soliciting with the gazettes as tools. Now, NIESV is heading to court for a judicial pronouncement. They should.
The dispute brings to the fore the matter of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary orientation of some professions. Mores and norms established over the years decided the pecking order. For some others, there has always been disputation over who is the dominant player.
The Internet and developments in ICT have complicated the matters the more. ICT tools and templates have removed the mystique from several practices and procedures in many fields. People easily step in to do what were exclusive preserves before. Should that justify interloping?
Many areas witness this matter of either undefined boundaries or boundaries that are easy to cross. Journalism and public relations are related fields in communication. They meet at the intersection called media relations. Public relations people push specific client information with the media as platforms to reach stakeholders. Ethical codes restrain each other from crossing the boundaries. In Nigeria, however, the boundaries have become blurred with many journalists doing media relations and many public relations firms pushing publications as journalists. Many fields replicate this challenge.
Is another discipline chipping away at your profession unbeknownst to your members? Does the experience of our surveyors call for greater vigilance by other disciplines to secure their terrain?
Are Nigerian engineers crossing the terrain into the fields of other professionals, as the valuers assert? Is the motivation greed for more, because of the broad scope of engineering, or a need to declare the relative importance of engineering in the built environment arena? It would be interesting to watch as the battle of the engineers and valuers unfolds further.
Chido Nwakanma
