Good Maintenance Culture, A Panacea For Sustainable Dev

It is a thing of joy and indeed heart warming to observe the developmental projects going on and some even completed and commissioned by His Excellency the President and Commander –in-Chief  of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan during his maiden visit to Rivers State.

These projects are in the areas of road constructions, schools rehabilitations, renovations, and constructions of new classroom blocks, health centres and hospitals constructions etc.

The need to adequately and jealously protect and maintain these projects cannot be overemphasised, owing to the billions of tax payers’ money that must have been invested by the state government in order to improve the lot of the people.

To this end, a proper maintenance culture is being advocated as a panacea for sustainable development.

To achieve this, I wish to suggest the establishment of special maintenance units in all public structures; be it schools, hospitals, roads, machineries etc with a special fund budgeted for maintenance of such infrastructures. If such units already exist, then, the need to adequately fund them cannot be overemphasised.

I think that, it is a wrong practice to wait for total decay and dilapidation before embarking on repairs.

May I say that, it would be an unfortunate situation if due to non-maintenance and protection, these laudable projects would not serve the purpose for which they were intended.

As a people, we should come to terms with the reality that public or government project is not a “nobody’s” project as many believe, but our project, because whatever happens to such projects adversely affects all of us.

For instance, a road that was constructed with the aim of easing traffic or making transportation affordable is now in a state of disrepair, due to non maintenance; first and foremost, it would cause a lot of man hour loss, due to traffic jams, not to talk of high cause of transportation fares that may follow, thereby exposing the people to an untold hardship.

If a school building constructed to house students or pupils and to provide for a conducive learning environment is now dilapidated with leaking roofs and ramshackle structures, due to non- maintenance, which eventually exposes the students to environmental hazards that could even affect  their health.  This condition totally defeats the purpose of creating a conducive learning environment, hence frustrating the efforts of government.

Essentially, a health centre is built or established to cater for the health needs of the people, and suddenly due to lack of maintenance, the building structures and equipments needed to make healthcare accessible to all is dilapidated and malfunctioning respectively: such situation could only cause more harm than good to all.

May be in a community, an electricity project installation was vandalised.  The question one wishes to posit is who suffers? Obviously, everybody including the vandals suffers the same fate.

Interestingly, the barbers, the hairdressers, the radio mechanics etc that use electricity for their daily business activities may be adversely affected and even the general public.  But the vandals themselves may pay back when they have a need to use the services of a barber or radio mechanic etc as the case may be, only to realise that the charge may have been increased by 100 per cent due to non-availability of public power supply resulting from the activities of  vandals; as the barbers now employ alternative source of power through generator, possibly the “I pass my neighbour” type. It is important for us to know that our actions always turn out to be a thing of what goes around comes around.

At this juncture, I wish to present that good maintenance culture, as a  panacea for sustainable development cannot be overemphasised.  Therefore, it behoves all of us as a people to see to the proper functioning, maintenance and protection of these facilities. Not only these new ones, but also the existing ones and indeed the ones that will be provided in future by reporting to the appropriate authorities saddled with such responsibilities.

As a concerned Rivers indigene, it is my sincere hope and belief that the intentions of government under the leadership of Rt. Hon. Chibuike Amaechi to make these facilities available to us at such a time as this is for our collective responsibility to protect, maintain and above all continue to enjoy.

Ochiagha resides in Port Harcourt.

Samuel Ochiagha