Corruption is high in civil works – Surveyors president

What role do quantity surveyors play in the Nigeria economy?We’re important to the economy because we have idea on how much a building costs. When you look at things like due process – Bureau of Public Procurement the major drivers of that should have been quantity surveyors because we’re trained not only to manage costs […]

What role do quantity surveyors play in the Nigeria economy?
We’re important to the economy because we have idea on how much a building costs. When you look at things like due process – Bureau of Public Procurement the major drivers of that should have been quantity surveyors because we’re trained not only to manage costs but to prepare them from the beginning and keep an eye on them to completion and keep them within the limits.
Beyond that, in our training, we do a lot of law because of contracts. We do a lot of economics because management relationship between one who wants to have a building and the amount of resources he has. We do a lot of programming, scheduling. It’s quite a broad field. We’re trying to develop competencies within it. It has now developed up to Ph.D level in universities. We have membership grades – we have fellows.
A country that is developing, where we have so much infrastructure deficit, it’s necessary that the skills of quantity surveyors are not ignored.
We intend to have a national workshop. One of the things we observe is that professionals generally have issues being in politics and so they hardly influence policies which further influence development. One of the things I said I’ll do as president is to drive in the minds of professionals to go into politics. So we’re going to have at the end of this year a seminar that will be around politics, policies and development and the role of professionals.

Is there glut in property market in Abuja? Many places are unoccupied.
The property challenge in Abuja is okay. It’s still a growing city. We’ll eventually occupy them. But our biggest worry as professionals…one, is the size of the property and the possible buyers of these property. We probably need a different class of property. The second thing is managing infrastructure around the property. If you look at the new estates springing up now, you find that even access to them or access within them is a huge challenge.
The truth is that quite a number of these property are used to launder money. People engaged in graft find it easy to bury it in property. You can easily pick a property for N100 million if you cannot easily take it to the bank. As long as there’s corruption in this country, property will spring up. That’s why you find a number of them empty, unoccupied and the owners don’t care.
It’s affecting the market. When people inject huge money to buy a piece of property, you find that it becomes uneconomical. I set an example. You pay N120 million for a piece of land and you put another N70 million and then somebody comes to pick up the house for N350 million – if you take it economically and you’re supposed to harmonise that – let’s say 40 years, apart from activities that will take place to keep it fit for 40 years, there’s no way you can recover N350 million in 40 years. These are some of the challenges that make the property market a bit difficult. Genuine investors in property don’t have the motivation to really invest.

So Abuja property bubble is likely to burst?
I think so. In enclaves like Abuja, probably now Lagos, Port Harcourt! But Lagos has a way of absorbing because there’re a lot of activities [there] but in Abuja where it’s principally government, honestly time will come when we we’ll have huge issues.
 
We were shocked hearing the huge cost quoted for Abuja Airport Road.
I know it’s a horrendous amount. One of the challenges we have as quantity surveyors is that for some curious reasons, the Nigeria government doesn’t think we have roles to play in civil engineering works. We’re trained to undertake…we’re trained with details. We’ll take the dept or thickness of a particular layer in a road, we’ll take the finishing, we’ll take the markings. A typical civil engineer takes the bulk.
One of the biggest areas of corruption is in civil works because if you say you’ve moved so many tons of soil from one location to another, people will just say okay, it’s possible. But for the quantity surveyor, we’ll get to the detail, to the last cubic meter and say for this, we can measure the cutting at this level, to this height…this is the quantity of soil that has been moved. Because quantity surveyors aren’t involved, we have this challenge.
So as an institute, what we’ve decided to do now is to commission studies in six universities in the six geo-political zones. We’re going to establish benchmarks for cost of say roads and bridges and dams in those geopolitical locations. Because of ecological differences, we get universities that will consider the peculiarities of the ecological zones and then establish benchmarks. We’ll give government the opportunity to have this fair advice. We’ll tell the public that these are the benchmarks so if government deviates from them, we’ll ask people to allow us to shout.

But the Ministry of FCT will probably say you’re involved because it has quantity surveyors. Contractors also have quantity surveyors. Maybe your members are equally compromised.
They’re hardly used for the civil works. It’s now that we’re pushing to have quantity surveyors in civil works. It’s not only roads and bridges. Railways and dams, power.

When will this study you’re commissioning be ready so journalists can refer to it as a standard to enable them ask questions?
There’s going to be a research conference. Even if the study is done, it’ll have to go through the academics to verify certain things to ensure that we’ve gone through all the rules. The research conference will take place in Akure next year. So between now and next year, we expect that those universities will have come up with their findings.

Can property tax really check money laundering in Abuja as government claims?
It’s not about taxation. It’s about people cutting in money in huge quantities and not knowing what to do with it. They can pay any amount. For as long as we don’t tackle corruption…There should be a lot monitoring. The Conveyance Act was enacted in 1881. It was inherited from the colonial masters, dumped on northern Nigeria. Some states have made slight amendment but that of Abuja is just undergoing review in the National Assembly.
There’re things that if we don’t get them right from the beginning, we’ll continue to have these challenges. The fact that I can build a house without involving any institution means I can collect any amount on it.
The CBN talked about dollarization of the currency. There’s huge movement of dollars – you can hide it somewhere and there’s no monitoring of the amount of foreign exchange. A lot of transactions are undertaken in foreign exchange.
For property in Abuja, for as long as there’s money in that order, a lot of people will just generate property and sell.

Why is it that we pay so much but we get so little? Compare projects of the same magnitude with those outside the shores of Nigeria. Why do our professionals allow these things to pass?
There’s what’s called the Bureau for Public Procurement [BPP] which is now headed by an engineer. There was a time it was headed by a quantity surveyor/builder. The Quantity Surveyors Registration Board established by law of the federation also has same functions as Bureau for Public Procurement at least in terms of guidance on prices and benchmarks when you read the law. And there’s no collaboration between these two institutions. When I hear BPP say so much money has been saved on a particular project…the truth is these projects are not completed. It takes time before projects are completed. So the time will account for the money that was said to have been saved for this period.
We should be realistic. Establish a template and utilize it. A number of times we just sign project agreement with countries without exposing the details of the deal so you can’t know what it is.
I will give you an example: when I was the Minister of Power, I was the one that signed the MoU on the Mambilla Plateau project. It was supposed to be for $3 billion. Just recently I read that it has been reviewed and it’s now $6 billion. The difference in international or offshore escalation costs can’t be 100 percent. At that time it was supposed to be almost 3,900 megawatts. Now it’s 3,500 megawatts so there’s a drop in the capacity.
When we get into such huge infrastructure projects…one, we don’t use our local competencies.There’re local issues in costing, there’re local issues in materials to be utilized, there’re local issues in community relations. But there’s somebody outside there that will determine those and so you can imagine the cost.
And most of these infrastructure, because of dearth of government financing, they normally come either under PPP arrangement or direct foreign financing. Until these foreign projects are reduced to local auditing, we’re going to have these huge costs.

What is it in government that prevents us to do the right thing? You were in government so you should know.
The political will. There must be the political will to really domesticate some of these things and it has to be deliberate. When Obasanjo was president, he was in love with foreign inputs. Somebody will come with a small bag and go straight to the villa to see the president. The same tradition has been maintained. When that changes, then probably we’ll have local capabilities.

President of the Nigerian Institute of Quantity Surveyors (NQIS) Murtala Aliyu last Wednesday led the executive of the institute to the corporate headquarters of Media Trust for a familiarization visit. The following discourse ensued: