Nurudeen Rafindadi, is the Chief Executive Officer of Afri Project Consortium, a multi disciplinary consulting firm and national President of Association of Consulting Engineers of Nigeria. The frontline engineer that identifies problems of engineering business, evaluates and measures performance in engineering business in Nigeria and recommends solutions, spoke to GEORGE OKOJIE.
Your arm of Engineering organisation is business oriented, can you tell us what it takes to succeed in engineering business?
We are a business entity. As the present leader the first thing that comes to my mind is to promote professional excellence and enhance the practice of our member firms. We want them to be successful in their business.
Being successful in business does not stop at being competent professionally. You can be competent professionally and not do well as business entity. We? have also discovered that you need to possess a lot more business acumen in other to succeed as ACEN firm member.
You need to do more in understanding the market that you operate. How you maintain relationship with your clients and how you manage your business as business entity. It has to do more with how much you are paid. How you get your money from your clients. Much of which for now comes from government departments, agencies and ministries.
How you work with the policy level of the government to improve the well being of your member firms and members in terms of employment conditions of engineering firms and in terms of business opportunities for Nigerian engineering professionals. I am personally interested in promoting these for our members.
Is there any way you can insist that a certain percentage of jobs from government be given to Nigerian Engineers?
We will try to advocate for the involvement of our members in the ongoing programmes by the Federal Government. We are like chambers of Commerce and industry. Our engagement with government at the policy level is to try to do that. The Local Content Act is a law.
But for now it focuses on the Oil and Gas industry and some of the provisions of the Act is that if you come to Nigeria and get an engineering job, no matter your nationality a minimum percentage of the input you make in the job must be Nigerians. That is the law.
We as players in the industry are supposed to open our eyes and watch. If there are any infringements we tell the necessary authorities. Beyond that we want that principle to be extended beyond the oil and gas sector. We want it extended to the construction industry in general. From the stand point of government, the government interest is to get the best person to do the job. So that you don’t get failures.
They don’t want to dilute that commitment with an insistence that it must be Nigerian. We so presupposes that is a feeling that when you take a Nigerian you are taking a second grade professional. But that impression is not correct. We have some of the best professionals in the world that are Nigerians. That has been acclaimed globally.
Your firm presided over the design and supervision of engineering works in Nigeria between 1996 and 1999 under the PTF programmes will you still be involved in the new dispensation?
I must tell you my firm Afri Project Consortium was more actively engaged as consultant to the Petroleum Trust Fund(PTF) in the late 1990s. At that time I remember at the peak of the activities of PTF there were over 620 Nigerian consulting firms and over 90 per cent were providing professional services.
We did not find the professionals wanting at all. They had projects across the country and employed something getting over 240 Nigerian engineering professionals working in the course of delivering the infrastructural development. They made proposals produced the designs, and went out there in the field to execute it. Those that got the opportunity to run those projects are still there. You invite a foreign consultant; that has a time limit to finish what he is doing and go away. He doesn’t have the time to stay back here.
I will recommend the principle. The principle is that you must involve Nigerian professionals in these projects. But within these principles are different models. In my experience in the last 10 years, I have seen two or three models at work. The first one is what PTF adopted. They created an organisation? that is entirely different from government agencies, ministries and departments and they used their funds to execute projects across the country.
They employed professionals that did the work and they funded the projects directly. This model has its own down side. The criticism is rift because it does not have the enthusiasm and support of the public service and some argue that it has problem of sustainability. That is once the contracting firm leaves, if it is a road project, that road has to revert back to ministry of Works for continuous maintenance. So therefore there is this problem of continuity.
The second model, I have seen is the model in which the money is embedded into the budget item in the Federal ministries and department and there is a body created that has an oversight function to know how this money is used by the ministries, government agencies and departments that award the contract, make payment and spend the money.
But there is a monitoring unit that tracks and monitor the way the money is spent and monitor the performance of the project other than the National Assembly. They monitor and evaluate the performance of the project and they report back to the president. That was the model taken largely by the Millennium Development Goal (MDG).
The Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the president on MDGs picks the reports. Because MDG did not spend the money themselves, they appointed Nigerian professionals of which my firm happened to be one. I was national consultant for the monitoring and evaluation. That is different. I never supervised any project. I never signed any valuation. Our job was to go out basically to monitor the performance of the projects.
What in your estimation can be done to get consulting Engineers involved in Subsidy Reinvestment Board activities?
Subsidy reinvestment is like any other opportunity that has risen in the past. Our argument in the sector is that the way forward in the industry is to pursue sustainable development. Substantial part of our time in this country is spent in procuring development at first world price. In other words a typical engineer you import here can cost 20 times the amount you spend on his Nigerian counterpart of equal value, training, education.
The cost is so expensive that you cannot sustain the development. Even if you build a fantastic engineering infrastructure you have to maintain them. You cannot continue forever getting these services outside. Get these services from within and more importantly to enhance the economy.
It will create jobs and make sure your infrastructure is sustained. To us it is not only about having access to huge resources but how you use the resources to impact on the economy. That is why we always engage the government to see the benefits of using indigenous capacity to create sustainable development. If somebody says we don’t have enough capacity in Nigeria.
But we have a lot of Nigerians who are trained engineers, trained with public funds and resources of their parents. Many of such engineers are out of jobs. They represent the capacity.
Do you unwind?
Yes I unwind. I find time to relax with my family members, colleagues and associates and enjoy living in the midst of people. I love adventures and? read great books by great writers? as leisure. My main objective at any given time is to impact positively in the lives of others. In doing that I also ensure my system is not over stressed.
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