AUGUST 29, 2013
Minister of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, Ms Amal Pepple
The Federal Government has advised architects and other professionals in the built environment to desist from requesting high service charges from their clients.
It said experts in the industry were becoming inaccessible as a result of their high consultancy fees regardless of the fact that most of their clients were poor.
The Minister of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, Ms. Amal Pepple, said this at the 24th edition and annual exposition of building materials and construction technology tagged: ARCHIBUILT 2013, organised by the Nigerian Institute of Architects in Abuja.
She said, “I wish to observe that the desire of members of the NIA and other core professionals in the built environment to provide solutions to everyday living will be richly met by recognising the need to create opportunities for the citizenry to have improved access to professional services.
“One way of doing this is by charging appropriate and discriminatory fees in recognition of the high poverty level in the country and the need to ensure improved access of professional services and expertise to even the poorest poor.
“It is in this regard that I find it odd that very often we lament that there is a preponderance of quacks in the built environment without realising the need to reduce our charges to make them affordable and accessible to all the income streams in the country.”
The minister stated that it was by patronising such quacks that the built environment had continued to be bedevilled by rising incidents of professional negligence, wanton impunity, corruption, appalling standards resulting in dilapidated critical national infrastructure, failed buildings, building collapse and fire hazards, among others.
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