From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) has strengthened partnership with the Nigeria Building and Road Research Institute (NBRRI) to ensure quality building construction in basic education facilities in Nigeria.
To the end, the organizations organized a training for relevant officials to ensure proper deployment of modern tools for the supervision of several building projects across its facilities.
Executive Secretary of UBEC, Dr. Hamid Bobboyi, who addressed the participants at the training event in Abuja, on Monday, said the government has vowed to crack-down on substandard school building construction across the country.
He urged the stakeholders including the State Universal Basic Education Boards (SUBEBs) to leverage the opportunity to ensure quality in the delivery of school building projects using simple tools for on-the-spot assessment at projects sites.
Dr. Bobboyi said the Commission will no longer condone shoddy execution of projects, warning contractors about the risks of delivering substandard school infrastructure in the country.
He restated the commitment of the Commission working with SUBEBs to improve the quality of educational structures in order to ensure safe and conducive learning environment for Nigerian children.
He also disclosed that the Commission would deploy monitors who would frequently go to find out what is going on across the construction sites, and maintained that educational infrastructures are sensitive projects that must be handled with ultimate sense of responsibility so as not to risk the lives of children and staff of the institutions.
He regretted the recent incident of school building collapse in Jos, even though not a building sponsored by UBEC, urging state governments to take proactive steps to ensure that contractors handling school building projects adhere strictly to specifications.
He also said the Commission is working with NBRRI through its Chief Executive, Prof. Samson Duna, and the Council for Registration of Engineers in Nigeria (COREN) for a few years to ensure that they are part of the monitoring teams at the state level.
Director-General/CEO, NBRRI, Prof. Samson Duna, in his remarks, said the training programme was a proactive steps by UBEC to forestall the incidence of rampant building collapse in Nigeria, especially school buildings.
He explained that the participants who are UBEC technical staff would be visiting the sites with modern tools to ascertain if the contractor is using the right steel and concrete for building construction.
He reiterated commitment to ensure that the quality of concrete meets the specification, saying that it has established tools that measures the concrete in its wet state and measure it when it has hardened.