Mr Ayuba Akere, Chairman, Nigerian Institute of Quantity Surveyors (NIQS) Lagos Chapter, Akere, has urged all tiers of government to engage the services of quantity surveyors in capital projects, housing and road constructions to minimise costs.
Akere gave the advice in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Friday.
According to him, quantity surveyors will help to monitor and evaluate the costs of projects to ensure that the allocated funds are properly used to achieve the targeted objectives.
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He said that quantity surveyors were cost managers and evaluators, who specialised in expenditure and cost assessment to ensure that incurred/proposed costs were justifiable.
Akere said: “The continuous mismanagement of government’s funds allocated to projects is as a result of absence of professional quantity surveyors to evaluate and monitor the cost aspects of the projects.
“In Nigeria, the government has allocated huge sum of money to some particular capital projects for more than five to 10 times, yet such projects have not been executed.
“If the quantity surveyors are involved in handling the costing of such projects, they will ensure that maximum value is derived from every expense incurred.
“This is because cost evaluation, expenditure management and rendering of cost advice are the major areas of job description of quantity surveyors.’’
He said that there was the need to involve quantity surveyors in all aspects of government’s cost management, particularly now that there was economic meltdown in the country.
Akere said that if developers, corporate organisations and private individuals engaged the services of quantity surveyors to evaluate the cost of their projects, losses and excessive cost/expenditure would be reduced in the country.
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He said that “when quantity surveyors are involved, a lot can be saved, while wastage and misappropriation of funds will be reduced to the barest minimum. ’’
Akere, however, pointed out that location, variations in cost of construction were obstacles to benchmarking the prices of housing/rents across the state.
He said the cost of materials, particularly manpower deployed into construction varied from one location to the other, which was responsible for the higher cost of rent in some areas than the other.
“The price of house/rent depends largely on the location and cost of construction because the price of a bungalow apartment located at Lekki area of Lagos State can never be the same with the one at Agege area of the state.
“Due to variations in cost of human and material resources from one location to the other, it will be difficult to set standards in the price of houses,’’ Akere said. (NAN)
