Watertight, airtight: What state is Nigeria’s maintenance economy?

Maintenance economy (ME) is a complex interaction of upfront investment, ongoing operational expenses, and long-term value creation. It involves balancing the benefits produced by maintenance against the costs incurred. It is the planning, executing and controlling of maintenance budget before procurement of an asset, during operation and after the lifecycle of the asset. Maintenance economy is the soul of maintenance and its adoption leads to a sustainable maintenance culture. Maintenance culture is the set of values, behaviours, attitudes, perceptions, practices and underlying assumptions used to guide maintenance activities performed to prevent assets from failing and keep them in proper working order. Maintenance refers to a set of processes and practices that aim to ensure the continuous and efficient operation of machinery, equipment, and other types of assets typically used in day-to-day activities.

The importance of maintenance from an economic point of view is enormous and this importance is captured as a vital element of modern economic theories. The importance of maintenance is particularly prominent in construction products like buildings, roads, bridges, dams and telecommunication infrastructure. Lack of maintenance of construction products is better imagined than experienced! Imagine the implication of a damaged dam releasing its water to its immediate neighbourhood causing flooding and submergence of houses and death. Imagine columns of the hall of a church with 50,000 worshipers’ capacity collapsing while the church is full to capacity, killing all the occupants. That is why, as early as possible, builders are trained to build every structure “as if they are built permanently”. A professional builder does not manage materials or compromise quality of construction materials under an excuse that the structure is a temporary structure. Even temporary structures must have the best health and safety quality. Every milieu of the structure must meet building codes requirements. The parts that must be watertight must be watertight, and those that must be airtight must be airtight. Water used for a mixture of composite materials must be clean and drinkable.

Construction is the process of providing critical infrastructure necessary for ensuring the welfare and security of the people as provided for by the constitution of a nation. Construction projects have great potential to contributing to the socio-economic development of any nation as a driver of growth. Construction is a general term meaning the art and science of forming objects, systems, or organisations. It comes from the Latin word ‘constructio’ and Old French word ‘construction’. To ‘construct’ is to build and construction is the process of building or installing a structure. Construction has three major advantages of provision of physical infrastructure on which other sectors of the economy depends; can be used as a strategy to create jobs and generate income because of the size of the industry and importance of its products to the economy, and it is a major contributor to the gross domestic product (GDP) of an economy, contributing between three percent, mostly in developing nations, and 10 percent, mostly in advanced nations.

Quality buildings and roads are two of the numerous products of the construction industry that are necessary for living. Buildings, the second basic need after food, are essential because: they serve as homes to people by protecting them from inclement weather (wet rain and scorching sun); they are places for storing personal belongings and properties; resting place and a hub of strategising; centre of procreation and training of the young ones; store of value as they appreciate with time; and status symbol and “bundle of joy”. Building and road lives are elongated with efficient maintenance. The 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, in Chapter II, Section 15 (Political objectives) subsection 3 (c) says the government shall: provide adequate facilities for and encourage free mobility of people, goods and services throughout the Federation.” In a period of scarce resources, including finance, it is pertinent that governments embark on effective maintenance of their infrastructure, especially roads, buildings, electricity, telecommunication, education and health.

Building watertight or airtight structures does not fill the void created by wear and tear due to consistent usage and old age, necessitating maintenance in construction products. There are reports that over 50,000 of buildings worth N9 trillion are lying fallow in Nigeria due to lack of strategic management, especially maintenance. The conditions of the major roads like Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway through Sango-Ota, and Sagamu to Benin Road are also terrible because of lack of maintenance. On April 6, 2022, former President Muhammadu Buhari signed Executive Order 11 to ensure the maintenance of the federal public buildings across the country. The Executive Order is meant to reinforce the national public building maintenance policy which was approved in 2019. Up till now, no maintenance organisation has been established to execute the Order. Maintenance organisation is the department or organisation structure set up or put in place to make sure that maintenance management of the assets of an organisation is carried out. Maintenance management includes choice of construction materials to be used and how often maintenance will be done and by who.

A good maintenance structure starts with establishing a maintenance manual – a guideline which spells out the types of maintenance to be done and how it will be done (whether it is autonomous, preventive, predictive and corrective). This guideline stipulates that there must be a regular update of the register of assets and for inventories of all the assets of the organisation to be done regularly as a way of ‘assets tracking’. The guideline also states the maintenance organisation structure and how maintenance decisions will be taken. It is pertinent to state that maintenance organisation depends a lot on storage (facility cleaner’s room) for stocking and stacking of maintenance materials and facility parts which are regularly replaced like bulbs, consumables like engine oil, cleaning detergents, bleach for cleaning white ceramics, tissue papers, cleaning tools etc. Store is also used for keeping the disused materials that have been replaced for record and auditing purposes.

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