FG tasks professionals on creativity as surveyors unveil office tower

The Federal Government has tasked professionals, especially those in the construction and built environment sector, on creativity and initiatives that would lead to national development.

Bashir Yuguda, minister of state for works and supervising minister for national planning, who gave this task at the commissioning of an eight-floor Surveyors’ Tower built by the Nigerian Institute of Surveyors (NIS) in Lagos, also asked the professionals to add value to the Nigerian system through their work.

Yuguda, who represented Mike Onolememem, minister of works, disclosed that the Federal Government had a grand infrastructure agenda as encapsulated in the 30-year Infrastructure Master Plan that is envisioned to start in 2015.

According to him, the Master Plan is intended to guard against planning duplication at the various ministries, departments and agencies of government, noting that the recent review (rebasing) of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has given the government a clearer picture of what is happening at various sectors of the economy.

The minister congratulated the surveyors who, he said, have had visionary leaders, pointing out that 47 years ago (1967) when the institute conceived the idea of the office complex, many of their peers did not see the need for such a structure.

Earlier in his welcome address, Bode Adeaga, the president of the institute, had gone down memory lane, recalling how the journey to the day’s event started on November 22, 1967, with the application for allocation of plots 50/51 in Central Lagos for the building of an NIS National Secretariat.

Though a long and tortuous journey from then to now, Adeaga was grateful to God who enabled the renovation of the complex by M.i.Okoro & Association, a firm of estate surveyors and valuers, which has restored the complex to world-class standard.

“Meckson Innocent Okoro, the principal and managing partner of M.I.Okoro & Associates, worked tirelessly to secure a loan of N200 million from Enterprise Bank who has been a tenant of HFP Engineering in the same building,” the president disclosed.

Also in his address, Francis Fajemirokun, a professor, who stood in for Algali Kasim, chairman of the NIS Board of Trustees, explained that the office complex had been named Surveyors’ Tower to indicate unambiguously the ownership, and also in recognition of the fact that the complex is one of the tallest buildings within its neighbourhood.

According to him, the NIS Council approved the appointment of M.I.Okoro & Associates to see to the rehabilitation/renovation and subsequent management of the Tower.

Adeaga assured that everything had been fixed in the Tower, except the four lifts which, he said, had been commissioned to Feezy Engineering Company Limited to install. “A 500KVA generator and a borehole with water treatment system have been installed,” he said.

Chuka Uroko