Building Maintenance In Public Institutions

Maintenance is the coordination of maintenance activities designed to maintain, repair and improve buildings and their related systems to provide a safe, habitable, comfortable and functional environment in a cost-effective manner.

Challenges In Building Maintenance Practice
Occupants’ reluctance in carrying out regular minor maintenance work on their own thereby allowing repairs to degenerate to major work
Fast depreciation in property functions, aesthetics reducing economic value. There are a lot of low-quality building materials in the market today
Overwhelming cost of maintenance beyond budgetary provisions thereby increasing reduction in life cycle costing.
Challenges of supervising professionals, Artisans and other site workers.
In construction, we engage a major contractor who then engages sub-contractors to carryout different functions; one company to take care of drainage, another takes care of electrical, mechanical aspect, plumbing etc.

In the course of supervision, it was noticed that some companies use unqualified personnel to carry out important tasks that requires skilled labour of professionals, some persons carryout multiple function other than their area of expertise. The same person serves as carpenter, plumber and bricklayer with the sole aim of reducing cost and profit maximisation with less regards to quality production.

Possible Solutions/Approaches to Minimise the Challenges.

Some workable strategies adopted to solve or minimise the effect of the challenges are as suggested thus.;

Maintenance/repair obligation to be stated in the tenancy agreement with clear concrete arrangements that occupants are responsible for minor maintenance.
Preparing a reporting format for the occupants to report immediately which would be used in budgetary preparation in addition to scheduling routine inspection.
Bulk procurement of common maintenance components/items such as plumbing materials, electrical cables, parts and fillings. Also, in house painters to be used in minor scope of work. This will reduce cost of maintenance and timely response to maintenance repairs
Adequate supervision by skilled estate managers who monitor and control the use of non-professionals for skilled labour by contractors/developers at the construction stage of the building to avoid the use of substandard or low-quality materials which will necessitate frequent maintenance costs.
Recommendation/Conclution
Both public and private housing developers should stop so much dependency on foreign/imported building materials and encourage the use of improved but quality local building materials.
As a matter of priority, the government should improve on the poor state of infrastructure and environmental amenities in the tertiary institutions due to rapid population growth and urbanisation.
Nigeria universities and tertiary institutions should take the compliance of environmental impact assessment reports serious and ensure the compliance with the stipulated regulation.
Government should also encourage the National Building Research Institute to establish regional centres in the country and to provide research into building techniques/materials and method of construction.
The tertiary institutions should promote professionalism by using qualified building professionals to carry out construction of public building,