Lack of maintenance culture, cause of infrastructural decay – Adedeji

By Dada Jackson

The lack or absence of a maintenance culture has been ascribed as the cause of a lot of the infrastructural decay being witnessed across the country.

A facility management expert, Engr Afolabi Adedeji, dropped the hint in an exclusive interview with Newstrends.

According to him, most Nigerians do not imbibe the maintenance culture required to drive the management of public and to a large extent, private properties.

His words: “It is quite unfortunate that most Nigerians don’t have the mentality of seeing that the maintenance of any utility should be of paramount importance to them. We see the culture of maintenance as too cumbersome to imbibe.”

He frowned on a situation where after a facility had been commissioned, the next thing on the mind of the people would be how to move to the next development.

Adedeji who is a fellow of the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), said that unless Nigerians imbibed the maintenance culture, most if not all the nation’s public utilities would continue to waste away.

He took a swipe at the Federal Government for abandoning most federal projects in Lagos as a result of the relocation of the seat of government from Lagos to Abuja.

According to him, the state of most of the abandoned Federal Government properties scattered all over the country, was worrisome, adding that this development has resulted in huge economic loss.