Nigerian engineers have been advised to maintain standards and regard safety as their watch word, especially as it relates to their professional ethics.
The advice was contained in a lecture title, “The Ethics of Safety culture, Behaviour Culture”, presented by Engr. Ogona Richard Ogho, during a technical session of the monthly meeting of the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), Port Harcourt branch yesterday.
Ogho said providing a safe workplace lays the foundation for organizational excellence and integrity in strategic, financial and operational performance.
According to him, many leaders in the country have realized safety as the starting point to answer questions relating to professional ethics, adding that, “everyone has a part in keeping themselves and others safe”.
The resource person maintained that a safety culture is a broad, organization – wide approach to safety management and a safety culture is the end result of combined individual or group efforts towards values, attitudes, goals and proficiency of any organizational health and safety programme.
He opined that in creating a safety culture, all levels of management are highly regarded on how they act towards workers on day-to-day basis, stressing that safety culture starts with management and trickled down to others in an organization and companies.
Ogho noted that with the appointment of a champion at each location to assist management in building a safety culture, such person is responsible for understanding what it takes to build a safety culture at any location, including current hazards, areas of improvement and employee training for improved safety practices.
This person may also gather incident reports and conduct accident investigations. In many organizations, this person may be a safety manager but could also be a human resources representative, a shift manager or facility manager, depending on company resources”, the engineer posited.
He stated that as engineers, they are obligated to the society, organization, public, the environment and the nation at large to study the Latent Risk Factors and design, develop and operate inherent safety systems, that are hazards-free and environmental-friendly, because, “Human factor contributes about 98 per cent to unsafe environment while two per cent is equipment malfunction and natural problems”.

Collins Barasimeye