Engineering Indices and Infrastructure Report Card Committee of the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE) led by Ademola Olorunfemi and BusinessDay, represented by JOHN OSADOLOR engaged the Minister of Works and Housing, BABATUNDE RAJI FASHOLA on the programmes of his ministry in strengthening the country’s infrastructural capacity. Excerpts:
What is your perspective on the state of critical infrastructure such as roads, bridges and social housing in our country today that will meet current and future demands?
You know there are many perspectives that people can have about infrastructure. You can have a perspective of infrastructure just as an asset. You can have infrastructure as also a projection of sovereignty and national might. You can also have infrastructure as an economic enabler in terms of helping efficient business activities and so on and so forth.
But you can also look at infrastructure as an economic driver creating employment because the process of building it, procuring it, designing it, planning it and even after construction, maintaining and operating it keep people employed. So, there are so many perspectives that you can talk about , but truly and honestly infrastructure is so defining for human civilization. The size and the quality of infrastructure that nations acquire, or even individuals acquire, are almost directly relatable to the quality of life that they will experience.
If you can break it down to say, this is what is driving what we are doing now because we want to relate it to what Government is doing?
You remember that we experienced a recession in 2016. But it was a recession that was foretold in 2014, so it did not matter which party was in government. It was foretold. What matters is, what did we do? So, we developed an Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP). That was a government-led programme under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari working with the National Assembly. If you go back to your record you will see the date it was unveiled. There were many things in that plan but one of the notable ones is to make Nigeria’s economy globally competitive. That was one of the objectives.
Another objective was to invest in the Nigerian economy and one of the ways in which that plan was crafted was that Infrastructure, especially road transport infrastructure, was going to be key, infrastructure generally was going to be key. My Ministry (Ministry of Works and Housing) is responsible for the road transport side of it, so Ministry of Transportation has responsibility for the rail and marine transport sides of it. Ministry of Aviation has responsibility for air travel.
So, when you are seeing airports now being concluded, expanded; rail network improving, a new seaport and new roads and bridges being built, please understand that this is not an accident, it is following that plan. The spending on roads for example has increased from the N18 billion which it was in the 2015 Budget, which was the last Budget we inherited from previous administration to almost N400 billion budgeted for roads now. That does not include the SUKUK Fund, the Road Infrastructure Tax Credit Scheme (RITCS); that does not include recovered funds and invested funds. It is a massive and conscious undertaking- and when you look at it, it is still not enough.
We need to understand infrastructure in that sense; and when you look at our competitors, and those we just want to be like who seem to have everything, they are looking to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure; yet they seem to have everything.
I always tell people that President Buhari gets it, he just understands it. In conversations with us, he tells us that if we can fix the roads, fix the airports, fix the bridges, fix the seaports and fix power, Nigerians would get on with their lives. That’s more or less paraphrasing him. So, there are so many angles to it. Then when you talk about Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), you will realize that we are not only engaging construction companies, engineers, technologists, architects, geologists, laboratory technicians etc, we are also driving demand that keeps SMEs in business. So, from construction of houses for example, roofing sheets, doors, windows, nails, paints etc, all of these are products which small and medium-sized enterprises manufacture. So, when you really want to drive an economy, go to infrastructure.
When you finish, maintenance, painting, repair, lane-marking, signage, repair of signage and so on, I call it the most legitimate way to distribute money in our country. On commitment to infrastructure, I always tell my team, go and check – in my own lifetime I have always asked myself, is there a mayor of any city, a governor, a prime minister, a president that you have ever seen elected who gave an inauguration speech without talking about infrastructure? I can’t remember one.
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What are the challenges that we face in funding these highly capital intensive sectors vis-a-vis our limited resources and the fact that there are deficits that need to be addressed? Secondly, we know that your Ministry is vibrant in partnering with the Private Sector to address some of the issues, but we also know that in partnering with the private sector, there is profit aspect and motivation to make profit. Now if the off-takers are taken into consideration, is it a workable option for us to actually bridge the housing deficit that we have in this country?
You said something about private sector and housing deficit. You see, when we talk about the problems of financing infrastructure, it is not a problem that is unique to Nigeria. Let us just be clear about that. I was just trying to check now. I think the United Kingdom borrowed about £950 billion last year. So, nobody has money or enough money. There is a project, the nuclear plant, the Hinkley Power Project, which is being financed by the Chinese in the UK and being built by the French. Now, if you have followed the recent debate about America’s stimulus package on infrastructure, about $2 trillion, I think they’ve cut it down to about $1 trillion. What is at the heart of the matter? It is how you are going to pay for it.
That’s what is at the heart of the matter– so is it tax or by borrowing? So, let’s just be clear. So, they didn’t just want infrastructure and write a cheque; they write it on the back of their citizens. The only country that perhaps is in a relatively better place, is now easily the largest, perhaps the richest country- China, and then if you look at their road to greatness, it was infrastructure. First Agriculture, infrastructure, and then technology.
The most powerful nation in the world is the biggest debtor in the world. They have the most resourced-military, technology, universities, airports and shopping malls. But they have the biggest debt. You don’t want debt, Fine. So, you go and use the services there and when you get there you pay. Because we don’t want debt, you go and pay. Who is paying their own debt? Ask yourself. They carry the debt and then they decide what happens to you. That’s why I question the policy that decided to pay billions of dollars in 2005. We paid $12 billion dollars when our entire infrastructure was in dire need and you could have invested that money here, rescheduled the debt, create work-build schools, hospitals, roads, rail, airports, and so on. They were cheaper then.
When I hear this argument, oh the next generation, their future is being mortgaged, I say let them wait. Then, they will meet the price of cement at their own time. But if you invest today, it is an investment. It is not consumption. When you invest today, you buy at today’s price what the next generation will use tomorrow. If it is a generation that is not wasteful, they would work. As they create wealth, they will use that asset to create wealth.
As far as housing deficit is concerned, there is no scientific data behind it. So, it is a lie, I say so, that 17 million housing deficit does not exist in Nigeria. It is a lie and I will tell you why. First of all, it was credited to some multilateral institutions, including the World Bank and AfDB. They denied it. But nobody seems to know the source. I found the source. It was in the Preface to a Housing Policy written in 2012 and they have no verifiable data in front of it so it was just somebody’s speech that the public is now quoting.
No country in the world has 17 million housing deficit. We should not be trapped by extreme and negative data especially when it is unreliable and unverifiable and not supported by any research. With respect to the people behind this conversation, the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), they are Scientists and should find out and interrogate the lie.
How many of you here live in cities and are struggling when you have an empty house in the village? Let’s use common sense. Let’s understand therefore that whatever the housing deficit may be, it is an urban problem. It is not a rural problem. It is not a common Nigerian problem. It is an urban problem. Even in those urban centres, Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Kaduna, Aba, Port-Harcourt, Ibadan, Enugu, Owerri and a few others, are there not empty houses? So is there only a deficit such that we should be racing to try and build 17 million housing units when we have unused, empty, unoccupied houses?
If all of us keep telling everybody, go and bring two years’ rent in advance when your salary is one month in arrears, it is a big mismatch and there will be empty houses. When we say come and buy a house and pay within three weeks when in other jurisdictions, they are paying over 10 to 15 years, there is going to be a mismatch. So instead of rushing to build houses, let’s slow down and think. How many houses can we bring to the market by sensible, fiscal and monetary policies?
It is only when substantially those empty ones are taken off, that we can realistically say, we have a deficit. You can’t have 50 caps inside your wardrobe and say you have a deficit of caps, when they invite you to the village meeting; you have 50 caps and you want to buy more. That is not your need.
Can limitation on period of rent by landlords (one, two years etc in advance) be made a national issue?
The rent control as a national issue is only as national as we can discuss it. At the end of the day, it is a sub-national issue. So we have raised it to the level of national issue at the last National Council on Housing. I will ask that you are availed my address at the Council and my challenge at that meeting to all the States and their Attorneys-General to go and push for the legislature in their various States because it is a matter that concerns them solely– it is not an Exclusive List matter. It is not even on the Concurrent List, it is a residual (local) matter. So, each state must rise up to the defence and protection of its citizens based, of course, on consultation.
We need to also talk to the Institute of Estate Surveyors and Valuers, because I mean we can’t begin to ask people to come and pay 10 percent agency fee and 10 percent legal fee and so on. That is cost to him (the potential tenant); to pay for a lawyer and agent that he did not hire. It is not done anywhere. I hire my own agent, I pay. I hire my own lawyer to protect me from the Landlord and I’m paying him. So, if the Landlord asks a lawyer and an agent to look for a tenant, that’s his cost not that of the Tenant. And why 10 percent when in other jurisdictions it is 1 percent? So those are the conversations we should have. I assure you if we have this conversation and we move this forward, you will see it in the price of food coming down, because this cost gets passed on, everybody passes it on.
Speaking about infrastructure, one of the things we are doing in this report is to dimension it in many ways and one thing that we will be looking at is future provision so we are looking at infrastructure provision for future demands. What projection is the future demand based on? Have we got a master plan like the National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIIMP)?
Few days ago, I got this report. I just felt it was important to share it. Somebody went to the Enugu-Onitsha Highway and was taking photographs of the road and this is the report. “Eyewitness Testimony focus on work in progress” which we have recorded there. Three out of the six-lane driveways on the Enugu- Onitsha Expressway have been completed. According to him, by this development, the drive time from Onitsha to Awka has reduced from one hour, 15 minutes to 25 minutes. So, if truly time is money, and it is, if we reduce your journey time from one hour, 15 minutes to 25 minutes, then it saves money in your pocket.
So, when the President says, for example, I want to lift 100 million people out of poverty in 10 years you must give him credit for even dimensioning it. To all those who now have to travel almost 40 minutes less, will they remember that the President did this thing? Will they remember that time saved actually is money saved? And this is only one way; so I just want to ask you, those who used to sleep on certain roads, do they sleep on those roads now? Perhaps, the same enthusiasm we use to complain about how bad it was, maybe we should use the same enthusiasm to acknowledge the work being done.
This is why I actually liked that report because the Nigerian in question actually went out on the road, walked through the place, took photographs himself and just posted the thing. So, when you then talk about the master plan, there was one for 2013 to 2020, and this is 2021. We are revising that masterplan and updating it. What is instructive to note is that most of the projects that were conceived in that 2013 master plan are now under construction. Some of them are by the private sector players such as the Dangote Refineries. Some of them are by Government such as the Abuja-Kaduna rail, Itakpe to Warri, Lagos-Ibadan; all of these roads we are building now were listed in that master plan. Some of them were started, some of them were conceived before this administration. Why should there not be a road connecting Bodo to Bonny Island? That road is now under construction and so are many others across the country.
What we are doing now as a Government is that we are planning and updating that infrastructure master plan, I believe, from 2021 – 2030. We are taking out what has been done and updating it, because so many people will remember that it was allegedly going to require several billions or trillions of Dollars whatever but those billions and trillions are somehow already now being spent. So, we must deduct what has been done. That is how to plan and update our progress.
The other area you would also see is how to expand our energy infrastructure and to diversify away from heavy carbon to low carbon and then to the journey to carbon neutrality. We are undertaking some gas projects. Examples are the Ajeokuta and Kaduna gas pipeline projects. The airports and roads are almost coming to conclusion. The rail, as you know, most of the roads now are receiving one level of attention or the other and as we are building the roads, we are also now looking at the rail because you don’t want to build idle capacity because there is no idle fund. In some places now, we say rail is coming here. We don’t expand the road; just make it motorable because overtime we don’t want idle capacity. So, in that sense- that is like a bird’s eye view of what the future will look like. The details will come from each ministry’s plan.
Also, what provision exists to ensure built infrastructure are continuously maintained and sustained?
In terms of maintenance, we now have by policy; Federal Public Assets Maintenance Policy initiated by this Ministry in 2019. It was approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) and what it seeks to do is to use maintenance as an economic driver. That is the case we made to FEC. People say maintenance is a culture, I disagree and I have tried to persuade my colleagues here. Maintenance is an economy and we must consciously start that economy and make it work.
SMEs which are the bulk, we have 45 million SMEs in Nigeria and they make all sorts of things. And they represent the heart of every economy in the world, not just Nigeria’s economy. SMEs are 50 percent in some places, 90 percent of some other economies. All these law firms, dental clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, estate surveyors, all of them are SMEs. They are the ones who really employ people. Those people who make paints in their backyards, who make shoe polish, who make nails in small factories, bleach, soap, detergent, once you start maintenance, you create a demand for their products.
Doors, sockets, toilets that don’t work, they are in every building, broken windows, leaking roofs, that’s somebody’s job. So, the Federal Government has approved this, starting with Federal Government Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). That is why we are proud to say that if you come to our premises today, you will see that we are leading by example.
We have become the referral agency to help train others to do their maintenance assessment, condition assessment and from there they will produce their maintenance requirements, procurements and execute them and then we collect data from what they have done, how many people were employed? It is work in progress.
Q: If we can fix the roads, fix the airports, fix the bridges, fix the seaports and fix power, Nigerians would get on with their lives.
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