Speeches

Transcript of Speech Delivered Extempore At Technical Workshop On Physical Planning And Building Control In Lagos State

Jun 26, 2008 - It is fit and proper to express my very profound gratitude to all of you for responding to our invitation and also for digging deep into your pockets to bear the responsibility of this very important meeting with us. I thank our sponsors and all of the participants for responding in the way that you have done.

I think that it might be appropriate for me to start with a story I was privileged to listen to many years ago. There was this efficient builder and he worked for a very big construction company. He built so many remarkable buildings and projects for them. And at some point in time, it was time to say bye-bye and part ways. They notified him that within a matter of months they had to downsize and he had to go. Truly a remarkable builder and he was not happy.

Of course, the management met and said to themselves, what kind of gift can we give as a parting gift to this man, a man who has done so much to increase our profitability, a man who has given us a truly great brand name. And they decided that they will give him one more assignment. And they called him and asked him to build one truly special building. In his anger at being about to be laid off he built a very bad building, the worst he had ever built, he used substandard materials, cheated in every corner, and when he finished it, he got the shocker of his life. He was handed the key. It was his own retirement package. Of course, I leave to your imagination what will happen to that kind of building in a matter of years.

Poor workmanship, cheating, failure to comply with standards and so many more are some of the issues that have brought us into this room today.

When I became Governor last year at about this time in the rainy season, structures were collapsing, people were dying. A particular one in which a day-old- baby died really pushed me to the end of my wits. I wasn’t an engineer, I wasn’t a structural engineer, civil engineer or architect and I began to ask my self, what should we do, how can we solve this problem. I made a promise to Lagosians that we will stop these incidents of collapsed building in the State.

In the last one year, with my team we studied, we consulted, we read, we investigated, and we found some of the reasons that have led to building collapse. Many of them have been presented by the Honourable Commissioner and, I believe one or two speakers and I don’t need to bore you with them. But truly, I think that if there was a way in which to capture the problem, it is simply to say that we are paying for the way we have chosen to live and nothing more. We have refused to obey laws made by us for us. We have cheated the system, we have compromised the system. But we have paid in human lives, and needlessly too.

The last administration responded very strongly to these incidents, especially at the time when it was a series of building under construction that were collapsing. The measures that were put in place then have taken us this far. Very confidently, I can tell you that the incidents of building under construction collapsing have been on the decline steadily. But the challenge that we now have to tackle is that of buildings that have been built before the last administration started, in the period that we call the Construction Boom, the period of the Developer-Financiers, the early eighties. Those buildings are now reaching 20 years and what we have discovered is that in quite a number of those buildings, (a significant number) professionals were not involved. In many instances, they were built at night, in quite a number of instances; they had no approvals, when they had approvals the buildings did not comply with the approvals and so on and so forth.

And we thought to ourselves, what can we do? One of the first things we thought to ourselves is, well let’s do a two-stage approval process. We give you an approval in principle, and until you finish, we will keep people on the site. But we have challenges with that as well. How many can we keep on all of the sites in Lagos? With the way this economy is growing, with the way the construction is going on. When you finish, we will give you a certificate, a final approval that you have complied and then we will certify that the building is habitable. But then we found out that the problem was much more ingrained than just non compliance with approvals. Blocks for construction are being made with questionable materials, clay and sand that are unsuitable for construction, buildings are finished with substandard materials resulting in fires which impeach the structural integrity of the buildings. Even where developments and remodelling take place, professionals are not being professional. A request for approval to convert a storey building into a thirteen floor banking complex passed through my desk and I read the Environmental Impact assessor’s report and he wrote there and signed as a professional, that it will not affect traffic. What I expected in that assessment report is to state the traffic impact and advise on the strategies for mitigating the impact.

I see banks and offices springing up in some residential areas, and then we are faced with the issue of traffic congestion. We have security problems and we locked the street gates to prevent robbers from coming in. I don’t know whether it can solve the problems because the armed robbers are still there. But what we have done, if we reflect very carefully, is that we have locked up the State and denied ourselves of the benefit of the interconnectivity of Lagos roads and we have funnelled everybody into only one direction and I believe that if all of the town planners that we have here, professionals in this industry, put their heart to it, put their minds to it, sincerely that we want to make this State work again, I believe that if we address only the attitudinal issue, we will be more than 50 per cent out of the challenges that confront us today as a people.

I share this with you also as an example. Agege Motor Road was one of the old and long established link between Ikeja and Mushin and Surulere. It was the main road to the Airport then. Ikorodu road came along as a bye pass. But if you are coming from the Airport today and you are going to Mushin, the last thing that will pass through your mind is to pass through Oshodi. And even though my sciences were not good, I think I can still remember that the shortest route between two distances is a straight route. But we first go through the bye-pass, Mobolaji Bank-Anthony, then we go down Ikorodu Road to Jibowu then we turn back to come to Mushin and all of us are funnelled into the bye-pass and we have left the road because people are trading on that road. So we can build all of the roads, if we don’t let them serve the purpose for which they were designed, the problems won’t go away.

There is traffic in Lagos, but there is also street shopping going on in the street and you are stopping to buy pure water and I am also stopping to buy newspaper and the lady out there is stopping to buy pepper so that she can make dinner when she gets home. Indeed, they have started to sell beef. For every one of us that waits, we choke up the traffic. We have that choice to make, to change.

But you are the government, we serve, because you let us do so. And therefore, among all of the various options that we think can address this issue we say let the professionals come and look at it. Let all those who will be affected by it come and look at it. Let them bring the private sector expertise into what we want to do so that together we can agree on the way forward. Because if we are not communicating with you and sharing our thoughts, and sharing our ideas with you, I think that we will be doing a great disservice to you whom we serve.

I must thank the Chairman of the technical committee and all of you that have agreed to take up this enormous challenge. I believe that in the next one or two days, with the quality of the human resource that I see here, you should be able to produce for Lagos State, not only the solution of addressing the issue of collapse buildings but also providing a master plan and policies that will sustain the quality of life that I think that as Lagosians we truly deserve.

Why, may I ask, are buildings built by Nigerians 20 years ago collapsing now and why is the Lagos High Court built several decades ago still standing and structurally intact? Is it because it was built by Europeans? Are they better than us? Now, if as a people, we have also decided that we must use the land of Lagos more sensibly, more valuable, and begin to go vertically, how high can we go? How high should we go? Can we afford to build an Empire State Building in Lagos built by Nigerians? Will it collapse?

As far as my memory serves me, well over 50 years ago, the tallest building in Nigeria was Cocoa House built by expatriate capacity, 25 storey I believe. Is there any indigenously conceived, indigenously built 25 storey building built by Nigerians in Nigeria today without any foreign input? It means that we haven’t moved. Anything that we have added beyond a 25 storey that Chief Obafemi Awolowo built over 50 years ago with expatriate knowledge, anything that we have added still with expatriate knowledge means we have not moved from 50 years ago because we still use expatriate capacity.

I hope that we can find useful answers to these very, very challenging questions. I wish you very fruitful deliberation.

Thank you for listening.

BABATUNDE FASHOLA (SAN)
GOVERNOR OF LAGOS STATE