Surveyors propose punitive, preventive measures against construction failures

Worried about the high incidence of building and construction failures in Nigeria, building industry professionals, under the aegis of Nigerian Institute of Quantity Surveyors (NIQS), have proposed measures that can prevent further occurrence of such failures.

They said that governments at all levels need to strengthen the laws that govern the construction process and these should include provisions for severe penalties, not only fines, for everyone involved in any collapsed building project from approval to execution level.

The body which spoke at a quarterly interactive forum organised by the Property and Environment Writers’ Association of Nigeria (PEWAN), in Lagos recently, lamented that endemic corruption at all levels has blinded most people from adhering to professionalism, adding that it was so much so that those involved don’t care to sacrifice human lives for money.

‘’We have gotten to a stage where professional blacklisting as punitive measure alone is no longer sufficient to address the issue as erring professionals can always get something else doing to make a living.

‘’But when an erring professional is made to face life imprisonment or death sentence, reckon that this will help to bring sanity as well as curb this untoward development,’’ Olayemi Shonubi, NIQS president said.

The president also raised concerns on public procurement in the country, saying that, on the surface, one is tempted to say government and the private sector meeting the best practices in that regard because of the existence of Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) Act which governs procurement in the public sector.

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He noted, however, that in reality, given the reports from the Project Tracking exercises organised by the (Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) in conjunction with NIQS and some Cchief security officers (CSOs), public funded projects were still enmeshed in corruption.

‘’In a situation where ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) undertake projects outside their areas of operation leaves room for a lot of underhand deals aside from further increasing the administrative costs of running such projects,’’ he said.

He added that the private sector situation where no law binds the award and execution of contracts other than the basic corporate governance code, is more abysmal, noting that, because the spotlight is usually on the public sector, the tendency is to believe that corruption exists only in the public sector.

‘’There is a need for all procurements for constituency projects to be warehoused under a specific MDA for effective monitoring and supervision,’’ he suggested.

Another major negative development in the construction industry, according to the president, is the current increase in the cost of construction materials which he attributed to the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia, leading to rising energy and logistics costs globally.

He noted that these price increases has further exacerbated the global economy which was just recovering from the disruptions created by the COVID 19 pandemic.

‘’All these have far-reaching implications for the provision of affordable housing as fewer houses can be built within the resources available to the government, hence the need to marshal out plans to cushion the effects,’’ he said.

He listed some of those plans to include adopting indigenous architecture and materials as well as technology for housing construction; providing incentives for the manufacture of requisite materials whose raw materials abound largely all over the country, among others.

‘’It is only government that can engage in social housing. However, there are so many demands on the resources available to the government from infrastructure development to demands from educational institutions and health,’’ the president said,

He believes however that the coming of the Family Homes Funds (FHF) and National Mortgage Refinancing Company (NMRC) should help to cushion the housing crisis in releasing the much needed credit as well as funds for housing development.