Engineer Blames Building Collapse On Quacks

A structural engineer in
Port Harcourt, Femi Adeyemi has attributed the issue of collapsed buildings in Nigeria  to the influx of quacks into the engineering practice.
Adeyemi has claimed that some quack engineers who claimed to be certified engineers have infiltrated the Nigerian engineering profession, adding that many Nigerians patronize them because their services are cheaper.
Making this known while chatting with The Tide in Port Harcourt at the weekend, Adeyemi, who is a Fellow of the Nigerian Society of Engineers (FNSE), said that the NSE has existed for 55 years, adding that the society’s long existence ought to give Nigeria engineers a pride of place in engineering practice even across the world.
Nevertheless, he stressed also that empirical studies have revealed that most of the collapsed buildings in Nigeria were built by the quack engineers.
“Issues of collapsed buildings have cultivated to cast a bad light on the credibility and capability of Nigerian engineers, while the major cause of defective building is corruption”, he stated.
The NSE Fellow maintained that the society will deepened its relationship with government and make its obvious that unless it deliberately sets policies to standardise engineering practice, the country might not be able to conserve foreign exchange, build capacity and create jobs in the sector.
He said “we want to ensure that in anything we do in Nigeria, we use our own engineers. There is going to be a lot of emphasis on local contents’ which will strengthen the practice of engineering.”
Adeyemi maintained that pragmatic efforts should be made to address the challenges facing engineering practice in the country, and emphasized the need for all stakeholders in the engineering profession to be in the vanguard of efforts to reposition engineering practice.
He also maintained that engineers should empower the younger ones and put them through a continuous process of capacity building adding that the engineering profession remains the most critical to any development.
The expert, however, urged COREN, the umbrella body regulating engineering to faithfully execute its mandate of regulating engineering practice in Nigeria.

Corlins Walter