Chief Executive Officer Max-Migold and Head of faculty Facility Management Master Craft Diploma, Mr Paul Erubami has stated that Nigeria facility management sector needs nothing less than 250,000 facility managers to stem the rampant building collapse in the country.
Erubami stated this while speaking to newsmen, at the graduation of professional facility managers in Lagos.
According to him, Nigeria as a country needs to take training of people who are in charge maintenance seriously.
“Nigeria needs nothing less than 250,000 profesionaly trained facility managers and as we speak now in the country we don’t even have up to 10,000, we are struggling to meet 10,000 and we need a minimum of 250,000 and that is just private sector if we add all the local government, state government, military infrastructure, aviation and the federal government we are talking about another 500,000 more reasons why government needs to take training of people who are in charge of maintenance seriously”- He said
He advised the government to speak with associations like the Association of Facility Management in Nigeria to come up with training programs for all public officers.
“It starts with knowledge it starts with skills, this is how to put the right processes in place, then we can now move to the right budgeting where there is accountability people can budget correctly, where every budget will be tied to real need of the facility users for a lifecycle views, so that there will be no approval for a building project without seeing the lifecycle maintenance plan.
I dare say it’s high time we stop all these new elephant projects across the country we need to stop building new things, let’s get back to the drawing board, take stock, every local government, state government and federal government needs to be aware of the building”.
Speaking on maintaining government properties, Erubami said that Nigeria needs a system that includes the training of people who are using government properties.
“The training orientation for the government property users will do nothing but to orientate them on how to see government properties as their own, once that is in place we are sure of a maintenance system and then government can start embarking on building new properties for Usage”.
He stated that Max-Migold Facility Management Master Craft Diploma over the years has trained over a thousand and it is envisioned to train more in the subsequent years.
“We are graduating about a 160 people which brings about a thousand in the last five years in Max-Migold limited, our goal is to expand this reach, which is to train a thousand every year”.
Beyond training and graduating professionals who has gone through a comprehensive training in facility management to become qualified, certified facility managers in Nigeria.
Facility management is a movement that needs to be advocated for, both in public and private sectors in order to have safe environment.
We have to stem brain drain, building collapse, issues of dilapidation and build a society where facilities, maintenance should be looked at with a lifecycle mindset.
