Infrastructure investment must be within country

By Mashe Umaru Gwamna

The Director Infrastructure, Ministry of Budget and National Planning, Arc. Isa Halidu ,said that infrastructure investment must be within the country’s strategic regional setting and sector strategies that are both resilient for environmental sustainability.
Arc. Halidu made the disclosure recently, in Abuja while presenting a paper on “Building Resilient infrastructure “.
He said “for infrastructure projects to be resilient, laid out national and city plans must be strictly adhered to planning and designs before construction is under taken, environmental and climate should be focused on by carefully studied before going into design and construction”.
“We also need to understand that,in Nigeria we have varying in soil conditions that must be studied and considered in the design and construction of infrastructure project that must be resilient.”
The Director further explained that the implementation of infrastructure projects involve not only plan and designs but also monitoring and evaluation of the implementation stage.
“In engaging a qualified professionals in the design and construction professionals to implement the construction stage an honest and qualified projects supervisors that will not compromise standards should be trusted to handle it”.
According to him, ”after obtaining designs from accredited professionals like Architects and Engineers and following the due process in the award construction, a diligent and honest supervisors must be assigned to monitor and evaluate the process of construction.
“If I have my way, I will involve the EFCC in the oversight of implementation to deter any possible comprise.
“However, with honest professionals in the oversight standards are not likely to be compromised, so we will have resilient infrastructure at the end of the project implementation activities”, Arc. Halidu stated.
While calling on government to develop a national infrastructure maintenance policy in Nigeria, he emphasized that the policy will spelled out penalties for failures to maintain our national sub-national levels.
“We need to learn from other countries like; Egypt,France,United Kingdom(UK)United State of American(USA),where historical infrastructures have maintained resilience for hundreds and thousands of years.