Nigerian engineering regulatory Council, the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) have been charged to evolve an overarching framework for the integration and regulation of engineering practice in keeping with global best practices to avoid making the country a dumping ground for Pseudo expatriate engineers.
Nasarawa state governor, Umaru Tanko Almakura, gave the charge at the 26th Engineering Assembly of the Council for the
Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) ongoing at the International Conference Centre, Abuja.
Almakura also tasked the body on the need to evolve a more attractive condition of service in order to avoid capital flight and forestall flight of indigenous engineers to seek better working conditions more advanced countries.
Lamenting the incessant cases of building collapse in the country with its attendant negative consequences, Governor Almakura questioned where the problem of engineering regulation in Nigeria lies.
“Is the problem bedeviling the Engineering sector that of Inefficiency? Is it lack of Expertise? Is it a question of Integrity, resulting from unethical practices by the Professionals? What is the role of the COREN in curtailing the recurrent collapse of buildings, roads, bridges and high-tension lines across the country?” he queried.
The governor explained that: :”The only way to forestall capital flight, on the one hand, and to foreclose the flight of indigenous Engineers in search of greener pastures, on the other, is to develop a stringent regulatory framework and evolve more attractive conditions of service in order to retain Nigerian Engineers for diligent Engineering services”.
“This will go a long way in reducing Nigeria being a dumping ground for all kinds pseudo engineers as expatriate engineers in Nigeria, as well as address the critical challenges affecting the Engineering sector”.
He maintained that this will create multiplier effects as more economic opportunities such as employment generation will thrive in the sector and, by extension, boost our Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
“In consonance with Government policy focus, therefore, robust engineering activities will go a long way in addressing the deficient infrastructural facilities as a yardstick for flourishing manufacturing and industrial development in Nigeria”.
Ingeniers are greatly and grossly under renumerated. A typical Ingenier in the Federal civil service, especially at the ministries, receives paltry $150 on monthly basis. He is suppose to subscribe to professional magazines – both local and exortic, online and/or offline, soft and hard versions -, attend conferences and seminars where innovations and updates as well as latest trends in the profession are discussed as firsthand information. Meanwhile their contemporaries elsewhere receives between $10 000 and $24 000 per month which will make it easy for them to meet these professional necessities, usually priced at $5000 and above.
Laughable, also, is the irony of training people as Ingeniers – to locally device ways of surmounting critical challenges in the country within available resources, means, and constraints – only to push them aside and give those as contracts to foreigners. Ingeniers are only needed when all that is required are not readily available, anyother person – even illiterates – can handle those jobs or meet those challenges when everything required is available.
The first document they want to cite is the law of projects and contracts lifted from foreign lands without the slightest intuition that such laws only came in place after those societies have established the relevant technologies. In some of such societies, though such laws are operational, technologies that are yet to be established and ubiquituous are exempted until they become widespread and commonplace.
A full project is awarded out as contract, to show these guys are clueless. The correct thing everywhere is that a Holistics Ingenier handles the entire project and assigns various sections and subsections to other Ingeniers to design. He gathers all the various designs and models and assign to other Ingeniers to debug.
The various competences around the community are identified via TRR and TS. Contractors are then invited and prequalified for the various parts before bids are submitted and the lowest bids are usually accepted.
In Nigeria, we see people who know nothing about Engineering on the board to conduct award of contracts. The only questions they know how to ask are:- have you done it before, do you have all the heavy equipment, etc? The actual tests to verify that these claims are legitimate or otherwise are far beyond the aptitude of these clueless hyenas. If know what an hyena is, you would know the context being used here.
Government has no excuse anymore, it’s time we take our place in the mix of things.