By Leonard Okachie
The Council of Registered Builders of Nigeria (CORBON), has urged the Abia State Government to ensure that it applied the National Building Code in all of its building projects.
It said this would help in averting cases of building collapse in the state.
The chairman, Practice Committee of the council, Mr Wisdom Okoro, made the call during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Umuahia on Thursday.
He advised that only registered builders should manage building projects, adding that they had the requisite professional background to handle such assignments.
Okoro is a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Builders and former chairman of Abia chapter of the institute.
He decried a situation whereby professional builders were not carried along in building projects in the state.
He said that a building code established by seven arms in the building profession in partnership with other stakeholders, was adopted by the Federal Government in 2006 and revised in 2018.
He advocated penalising developers and builders who failed to adhere to the code.
He expressed concern that the code which had been adopted by the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, Lagos, Ogun, Ebonyi states and others, was not yet operational in Abia.
Okoro, who is a member of the Project Evaluation and Monitoring Unit of CORBON, said it was unfortunate that the present and past administrations in the state had not held anybody responsible for building collapse in the state.
“We are advocating that the government should adopt this code and put some penalties on people who do not use it.
“It is a shameful thing that we have professionals yet builders are not being carried along by the authorities.
“The government should allow us to assert our professional proficiency to reduce the incessant collapse to the barest minimum,” he told NAN.
(NAN)
