CHALLENGES AND WAY FORWARD
To fulfil the mandate of national economic development and connect engineering to the development, we need to identify some of the challenges as a nation that has led us to where we are.
The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr. Raji Fashola (SAN), recently lamented the poor infrastructural deficit in the country, saying that “the country only constructed about 28,980km out of the 193,200km total length of her road network in the last 55 years of its independence”.He has also been quoted as saying that the country has not carried any maintenance on of the bridges since they were constructed.
Minister Fashola enumerated the following challenges at a conference of commissioners of works in Kebbi recently
A) Land issues, compensation, and court cases compound the cost of construction.
B) Conflicts, security breaches, pose risks to construction workers, which escalates costs in many ways, such as insurance, payment of security personnel, delays to project completion, to mention a few;
C) The absence of uniform Public Sector Procurement
D) Proper project planning, development and supervision;
E) Post-construction maintenance of scheduled and unscheduled natures to achieve asset life cycle expectation and performance; (Bridges – Tamburawa, Tatabu, Third Mainland, Niger Bridge, Koton Karfe, Ijora, Isaac Boro).
F) Dispute resolution mechanisms as a means of achieving cost efficiency in road construction and achieving value for money, must be interrogated;
G) Government Treasury Operations and Payment Systems, review and reform will contribute to achieving better value for money in Road Development Project.
H) Increasing local content in Nigeria Road Construction and implementing Presidential Order 5.
I will add the following
- lack of home-grown solution to some of our construction and maintenance challenges.
- Lack of competent Nigerian companies to handle major road construction
- Lack of documented and implementable maintenance structure at the state, local and federal levels
- Engineering education not industry and national development driven
- This country we budget for construction but we don’t budget for maintenance or facilities management
- We don’t have record of our assets and their state to be able to plan for long term management and maintenance