Nigerians must have access to land in reducing housing deficit – CORBON chair

Chairman of the Council of Registered Builders of Nigeria, Dr Samson Opaluwah, tells DANIEL ADAJI how Nigerian could leverage smart technology to tackle housing challenges

What initiatives is the Council of Registered Builders of Nigeria taking to promote the adoption of smart technologies in Nigeria’s building industry?

Part of the Council of Registered Builders of Nigeria’s mandate is the regulation of building technology in all its ramifications in the country. So, we have a multi-pronged approach to the question you just raised. We start with the training, both at the tertiary and sub-tertiary level, and then we also start with the materials. Then we are following up with the construction and the delivery process on site.

In all this, the ingress of technology has begun to take effect on us. At the tertiary level, of course, we are transferring most of our processes, which are hardcopy processes, into technology. Most of our training and capacity-building programmes are now online, in which case people do not need to move from their locations to come to COGON to get trained or to build capacity.

It may interest you to know that every year, for a registered builder to renew his license, there must be evidence of capacity building. There must be a compulsory, mandatory professional development course that you take within the year so that you are up to date. Now, the same thing is taking place at the artisanal level.

We have also collaborated with the National Board for Technical Education on the issue of training. We have training centres that are licensed by us all over the country, and that is what we used when we participated in the NPOWER programme of the Federal Government. But you will agree with me that Nigeria is a large country. It covers a very large space. So, we are now introducing technology in the training.

So, currently, CORBON has a thousand of them, but it is nothing compared to the size of Nigeria. So, technology has been introduced. We have now reached the stage with NBTE, some technical partners and other sectors. These councils that we can now use technology to train artisans, I mean assessors.

By the time these assessors are trained, they will now apply the same technology to be able to assess the artisans. And we are expecting to expand this scope. With the results that we will be getting, we can leverage the capacity we have and expand it so that one assessor can be able to handle several artisans.

Then in the issue of materials, we are also opening up the industry in such a way that we have come up with a competition among our universities and polytechnics, and then those in practice, for the cheapest Nigerian-built house with local materials.

We realise that the cost of building is largely affected by the costs of land and imported building materials. So, we believe that if these two are addressed, we would have crashed the cost of building. So, that is how we have leveraged technology.

In the head office, we have established a training centre. It is called COPRESS- CORBON Professional Resources. From here, we conduct capacity building of our builders at various locations, for two hours.

How is the council working to make affordable housing a reality for low-income earners in the country?

We would call for the government to take the issue of access to land of citizens as a critical component of affordable housing. Let people have direct access to land. There are categories of homeowners, those who want just accommodation for them to live in, those who want to produce accommodation as an investor for others to come and lease, and those who do industrial-scale housing projects and estates.

Now, the government can come up with an imaginative policy that ensures that if you are seeking to own a building that will house you, access to land should be made almost free for you. But if you are now investing for business, that can be the difference. But I know that it is possible to think it out and get a policy that is responsive to the citizenry.

What strategies as a body are you implementing to address the current housing deficit in the country?

Number one is capacity building. Capacity building at all levels of the building ecosystem. By that, I mean that we are training and ensuring that those we train can deliver quality buildings at whatever level. The second thing is that we have also decided that we will support research into indigenous building materials so that our practitioners can build with local materials. Thirdly, we have engaged with the manufacturers of building products in the country on the need for them to ensure that the prices are not beyond the reach.

We understand some of the challenges they face, but we are also thinking that when prices are high, then the access of the average citizen will be limited. But then they require volume, and economy of scale to make more profit. So, we are engaging with them and recently, even though there is some controversy, you can see that one of the cement firms did say they are lowering prices.

We started that advocacy and we continue that advocacy. I also think that housing is a very basic requirement of man. Next to feeding is housing, food and shelter. That is what the basic things are for man. So, I think that we should focus more on housing and how people will be able to access land and their resources for housing. We are also in touch with various organs of the building ecosystem to see how they can help out in this matter of housing production.

Our builders are also trying in their own way. They are trying different types of indigenous technologies to reduce costs. And we believe that if all of us who are in the ecosystem will have this as our focus, we will achieve some success.

But the important thing is that we need a national programme. I’m glad to note that the Federal Government has a Renewed Hope housing programme. That is very good. We identify with it. We are very glad about it. However, we want also our builders to be engaged in these projects so that we can ensure the quality of delivery and sustainability of the programme.

 What partnerships has the Council formed with tech companies, startups, or research institutions to drive innovation in the building sector?

The latest technology in housing now is printing. And it might interest you to know that printing has been tried in some countries in Africa. We are also working on a collaboration with some countries in Europe, especially Italy, where recently I have had an engagement with a printing firm on the use of mud to print, not concrete now.

 And that takes me back to our traditional housing system, where we are used to building houses. And they are printing with mud. The only challenge we are having now is their equipment is quite expensive. We are thinking of if they can set up here and then we will be able to see if we can produce those equipment in Nigeria. It will go a long way. Then, individuals, and local governments can buy the equipment and begin to print their mud houses.

How do you intend to use technology to increase access to affordable housing in rural communities?

CORBON is the anchor of the Sector Skills Council on Building in Nigeria. In that way, we are in charge of training, certification and licensing of builders as a Sector Skills Council. Now, we are embarking on the training of artisans in all the states of the country. We had the opportunity to participate in the Empower programme, where we trained artisans to level 1 in all the states of the country. We intend to have artisans trained in every local government of the country. Now, we have gone ahead to develop what we call the National Occupational Standard. The National Occupational Standard is what is akin to the syllabus that the formal institutions use. Now, the informal uses National Occupational Standards. We have developed 11 building traits, levels 1 to 3. By the time you acquire up to level 3, you can build a house.

With technology, we will train you so that you can acquire the competence. Once you are tested and found competent, we will license you to operate right in your village. We wanted to use the local government headquarters as a pilot scheme.

However, we did not have enough trained artisans under the Empower. If not, we wanted to form them into teams in every local government so that they would even go and volunteer themselves to carry out their newly acquired skills by maintaining the local government headquarters. That will show people in the local government that some people have got capacity here now to develop and build houses. We believe that going forward, that will be a major programme for the government so that we can bring both the private sector and the public sector together. This, I must say, arrests unemployment at the local level massively, because right now, people are building houses.

But who, at what standard, and who is building those houses? Now, if you train them, they will build quality houses. When they build quality houses, the economic stock of buildings will increase. When it increases, they earn more money and their lifestyle changes.

What role do you think the government can play in ensuring that these dreams, these visions of Cuba materialise?

The Council of Registered Builders of Nigeria is set up by the law of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Act B-13. It is called Builders Registration Act B-13. Laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 2004. It was, first of all, Degree 4 of 1989. By this, we are a government regulatory body for the building sector. Our membership is spread, those who register, and who are continuing to register, are all over the country.

There is no local government where you will not get a registered builder, although more are concentrated in the urban centres. But we also have, so we want to be involved in a major national housing programme. We can deliver and we believe also that if there is a programme for us to deliver buildings. As builders, we can come up with the delivery of buildings, not a few buildings as we are seeing now.

They are not just housing estates, but we can take the building knowledge and technology down to the grassroots, where people can take ownership of their buildings and construct themselves under our guidance. That is what we want the government to do for us.

Then, we also want support for regulation. Right now, the development control organisations or planning authorities in most states are not able to visit and enforce their laws on the building sites. We have offered that; we can support them.

Once we are enabled, we can visit construction sites and arrest problems before the buildings collapse, because we know what should be done, and we know the laws that govern construction. So, if we are empowered, we will help every state of the country to ensure that they provide rights on-site. The builders are those who are constructing buildings. Many of them are constructing without builders, but we can ensure that not only will they construct with builders, they construct by the law. Then we’ll reduce building collapse. We are available and we offer ourselves because we are Nigerians. Whenever any negative news about Nigeria goes out, it hurts us. We are not happy. So, we request that we be given support to be able to do that. And this support will not just be money thrown at us.

What are the long-term goals of CORBON, in terms of housing?

Our long-term goal is to build a house for every Nigerian. A quality, affordable, and comfortable accommodation for every Nigerian with the expertise that God has given us.

So, we call on all and sundry to support us in this drive. That is our target. Our target is to ensure that every Nigerian is housed in a comfortable quality and sustainable environment.

The houses that we presently live in are ill-managed and ill-maintained, but our members are capable of deploying maintenance management techniques to make sure that they are living in a comfortable environment. Whenever we drive through slums as builders, we are also saddened, because that is not a sustainable way of living. That is not a quality way of living.

We can also help in urban renewals to get the quality of life of Nigerians to what it is supposed to be. Those are our long-term objectives.