Bern Akhigbe, national president of 80-year-old Nigerian Institution of Surveyors (NIS), stresses the need for the country to plan everything from constructing buildings and roads to farmlands and the population.
He starts by telling Special Correspondent, DADA JACKSON, the enduring multiplier effects of failure to do so.
Consequences of not planning
Do you know that if you go to Mushin or Surulere, you have Lagos? Mushin and Surulere were built during the old Western Region.
What happened that after Mushin and Surulere we could not plan again? It was just political. Is it not an anachronism?
In 1956 people could see that Surulere could be built, we should have road and everything planned; but as we were getting more money, we were becoming like people in the jungle. No more planning.
Those things that we needed to do to plan, we just abandoned them. And the cardinal one is surveying.
When you go to Abuja now, you would not imagine that we have the surveying profession again because it was a virgin land. When the surveyor tells the government what to do, the government would listen but along the line, nothing happens.
When you have bad roads, have you bothered to think about what the surveyor could have done? In a good country, they will find out what the surveyors have done.
The normal thing is that if you award a contract for the construction of a road, depending on the traffic that you want the road to carry, you will know the thickness of the asphalt.
But what we do in this country is call a construction company that you want to make a road from point A to point B. Before the man goes to the field to know the terrain, he tells you the cost is N1.2 billion or N2.3 billion.
How was he able to arrive at that figure? He has not done anything. The same man, who is going to do the road, will be the same man that will do the survey.
Whereas in developed countries what happens is, an independent person supervises the laying of the asphalt to ascertain the correctness of the job being done.
I can reel out so many things that are being done to circumvent the job of the certified surveyor in Nigeria but nothing is being done to checkmate this atrocity.
There is a strong mafia responsible for this development.
So, these are the things that we surveyors are facing as a major challenge.
We are talking of population, for example; you say you don’t have a good population figure, how can you have a good population figure when you don’t know the place you are occupying.
Getting it right
In developed climes, there is what is called cadastral survey. When you look at the cadastral, you say look this is the area where you can only plant oranges because we know that orange will do well here.
And if you want to site an industry there, you would say this industry will require water, so do we have a body of water around this area so that the industry can thrive?
You can only determine this through the cadastral survey that have been done.
So, you can see that we have gone wrong for such a long time. We cannot continue that way. This is one of the things we want to bring to the fore so that people will be able to ask relevant questions.
Indiscriminate approval given by planning authorities
If there is going to be physical development let us involve the surveyor in every aspect of the planning. It is not to put money in the pocket of the surveyor, no, but for the benefit of the country.
There is the need to ensure that anybody who wants to engage in any form of construction subjects his or her building plans for approval by the relevant planning authority.
The indiscriminate approval being given by planning authorities is also responsible to a large extent for the incessant building collapse in the country.
There is also the need for the relevant authorities to monitor on-going projects in order to avoid collapse.
The use of inferior and sub-standard building materials is another factor responsible for incessant building collapse.
100 years of surveying in Nigeria
The Nigerian Institution of Surveyors is 80 years old. Surveying itself has existed in this country for more than 100 years.
There was surveying being done in this territory that make up Nigeria before it became one entity.
So, as we are celebrating our 80 years as an institution, we want to launch a book later in the year, a compendium of information that gives a detail of what the surveying profession has been doing, the stages it has gone through.
We would need the media to be a part of this epoch making event. We want to identify the mistakes that we have made as a body and let the public know that these mistakes were not deliberate.
Not making a lot of noise to highlight your activities
I agree with you that the surveyor is not making enough noise because the environment has not permitted us to make the desired noise. The surveyor you know is the man on the street. When you want to survey a plot of land, you call him.
As an association, we don’t recognise such a person as a surveyor; the institution is doing something concerning that.
So, the country has to recognise that there is need to use professionals at the appropriate time.
Our problem now is number one, we want to call on the government to use professionals appropriately. Over the years, the surveyors and the town planners have been abused.
For example, you cannot carry out a town planning work if there is no survey. The man has to know the area he wants to plan. The man has to know whether there is a hill, whether there is a gully before he plans.
A situation where he just plans, he is planning in vain. The reason why I say that the town planners too have been abused is that sometimes the government doesn’t take advice from them. So; it is a very serious matter.
There is a basic law in this country which is very important; the Surveying Act of 1962.
Do you know the last time mapping was done in the country? Except for Lagos, Akwa Ibom, and Rivers State that have done their mapping, all other states have not done any mapping.
Before that time, the map we were using was the one of 1956 or so.
The Nigerian Institution of Surveyors is an unbiased body, we are not an employer of anybody, just like human rights people.
The institution does not have a representative in any of the organs of government such as the National Boundary Commission, the Maritime Authority.
Battle for supremacy among the seven built professional bodies
I won’t subscribe to the notion that there is a supremacy battle among professionals in the built environment. There is no rancour among the professionals in the construction industry.
However, to stem the tide of any unforeseen rivalry, we need to appoint a project manager where more than one professional is involved in a project. The role of the project manager is to delegate functions appropriately.
In a nutshell, it is a wrong impression that there is a supremacy “war’’ among the seven professional bodies in the built environment.