Mr Ayo Adediran is the Chairman of Lagos State Physical Planning and Building Control Appeals Committee. He is also the Chief Executive Officer of Urban Planning Smart Solutions Limited. In this interview with DAYO AYEYEMI, he sheds light on the activities of the Appeals Committee since its inception two years ago. He also speaks about some physical planning infractions, issues leading to building collapse and proffered solutions.
Since you assumed duty as the Chairman of the Lagos State Physical Planning and Building Control Appeals Committee in the last two years, what has been the experience?
The experience has been that of pioneering issues and also originating it into the larger society where laws are made. Many people derive joy in breaking the law rather than to comply with it. By and large, it is an opportunity for the citizens of Lagos State to have an alternative dispute resolution’s body where they can take their grievances and be able to express themselves. It has been exciting despite being the first of its kind in recent times. The law has been there but for some time, the body was not set up. It was not established despite the fact that it has always been in the law. The present administration has taken the bull by the horn by establishing the body to be able to assuage the grievances and complaints from members of the public, either by ways of physical planning matters or building control matters.
How many petitions have you received and how have you resolved them?
I cannot give a quantitative figure now, I will avail you later. This Appeal Committee is a quasi-judicial system and, for any system like that, it takes time. So if you just talk about petitions that have been concluded, there are some already started and some still in progress. I know that in our next meeting, we are going to be dealing with probably nothing less than 25 to 30 petitions. We want to resolve mostly compensation matters. There are also individual ones we have resolved. The funny thing is that few of the petitions were even brought by the government’s agencies. There are some that border on infringements on the rights of the people by the officials. The law gives us a wide latitude to look at all these things as long as they affect physical planning and building control. We don’t venture into other areas. All our members are on a part-time basis and we have been tackling all these issues.
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What are you doing to sensitise the public about the existence of the Appeal Committee because many people don’t even know it exists?
From our own side as the committee, we have at one time or the other addressed the press. We also had a video interview. There is a limit to what we can do now because we don’t have the resources to be placing adverts. We can only use the available avenue to really push out the activities of the committee.
 Let’s look at the issue of physical planning in Nigeria, it is as if the government is not showing much concern to ensure orderly planning of our cities?
My opinion about this is that nobody wants to live in an unorganised community. Nobody derives joy in living in a slum. In the real sense, when you look at some of us from the rural setting/communities, you see the element of planning. It means that people that are uneducated as these communities value planning. They also valued environmental protection. They have a way of disposing of their solid waste, they have a way of getting things done, even in land uses without going to school.
Modern town planning became popular during or shortly after the industrial revolution, which threw so much of environmental challenges even to the Europeans, particularly Britain. So for us, we have the twin challenge of development going ahead of planning and the issue of governance. When talking about development ahead, you cannot imagine as we speak, over 50,000 building constructions are on-going. You will agree with me because we are talking of a population of 22 million in Lagos. There is no way we will be able to catch up with over 50,000 building constructions going on simultaneously.
When you look at the antidote to that from the developed countries, it is that they take planning into the rural or lowest level of government. Meaning that the local government system is the one handling planning and it is well recognised and established to the extent that my neighbour will not be doing anything by the side of my residence without me escalating it even from the day he started digging the foundation. When they are submitting plans at that local level, they will ask those of us living close to the development to come and see what is happening. If he is probably putting his window to intrude into my existing room, I can raise objections. It is so democratised that planners are recognised, architects are recognised and the rest, and everything goes well. But in a way, there is a saying that you cannot put something on nothing. Lagos State, despite the challenges, seems to be the one with the element of planning. The Federal Capital Territory in itself is not even coping. So if Lagos is doing that, it is because it has laws and regulations that give it the opportunity to enforce the rules of the game; but the challenge of governance is still there.
At a certain level, the state can be practising planning policies like preparation of strategic plans and supporting the local government with personnel and so on. Besides Lagos, other states just see planning as internally revenue generation. It is like they are using the planners in most of the states to pursue developers for money generation. This is not planning. Planning is about the people getting the support of the government to live well and wellbeing of their physical environment. Government alone cannot do it. There should be planning laws that can test the time to ensure sustainable development. That law will also specify or provide for the appropriate level of government, I mean the institutional framework to carry on the work of planning.
All over the world, I have not seen anywhere you just sit down in one office and want to control planning all over. Besides that, we consider the population threshold in a city like Lagos. We are in Magodo, Magodo itself is just a scheme; it could even have a kind of institution to regulate planning, to make sure that if somebody is changing use, it is looked at professionally and technically. What happens nowadays is that some of these developers just acquire big estates. They are profit motivated and at the end of the day build, make their money and exit. Nobody is talking about how do we regulate or control development, and many of them are gated estates. They don’t look at the interconnectivity of the residential estates they are talking about. Yes, they are contributing to the housing stock, they are also contributing problems to issues of transportation, utilities, waste disposal, especially where there is high water table, treatment of sewage and others. All these things could be done by two to five estates together, rather everybody locked themselves up. They will all come to the main roads again to create problems for all of us.
 Is it because of this disjointed approach that makes the estate a sort of problem to the society?
There are so many things wrong. All these isolated estates are supposed to come from the policy. Everybody should know what to do, but as soon as you get your land, either bought from indigenous owners or get allocation from the state, you don’t mind the welfare or the situation of those who are aborting you – west, east, south or north. And you know the first thing a developer does either individually or corporately is to fence his land. That in itself is an evidence of failure.
How do we correct this to ensure interconnectivity among estates?
Like I said, you don’t put something on nothing. There should be a policy, we have to cooperate, the government cannot build for everybody and when we now have some investors wanting to build, there should be a blueprint arising from a strategic physical development plan and the action area plan. How many of such estates do we want, where do we want them, how are they going to be built? We need them, we want them, but they cannot be operating on their own rules.
What can you say about the issue of incessant building collapse in the sector?
When you say building collapse or collapse of buildings, nobody is happy that we should be seeing buildings dropping down like a pack of cards. It costs the developer a huge amount of money to put any structure up. Also, we cannot equate any life to naira and kobo. So everybody is concerned about building collapse. But again, building construction process in itself is a process and it goes from one part of the cycle to the other. In that wise, the product we are seeing is a function of the outcome of success or failure of the process. Not only that, we talk of building collapse in this clime as if only an individual is at fault. It is a multi approach, multidisciplinary in nature by the people who are concerned.
 What do you mean?
If you conceive an idea of what you want to build, you need a surveyor to demarcate it for you, you need to know the use, and that use is to determine where you can only put what. Having known that, you relate it to the general surrounding and that is where a planner comes in. The general surrounding is to say that you will be your neighbour’s keeper; don’t overbuild the estate so that water won’t be coming from your roof to another person’s; don’t build so that you won’t have where to park and don’t build so that your waste water will not find where to go. This is part of the process before the architect picks it up and gives you what you want. But in most cases, there is always a disconnect. The architect may not actually have access to the general plan of that area or just wants to impress his client and then design what will catch the fancy of the client irrespective of whether it is buildable or not. Again, it is not also shifting the blame to him because there is also the government’s regulatory body that would also look at his work. Of recent, you can also have this design approved and get to the site and somebody fraudulently collaborated with you to build what was not approved.
 What are the solutions to these issues raised?
We should have strong regulations. Not just to put some funny clauses in our building or planning regulations, we must go further to look at all departments of the building construction process. Not just by getting approval because the building does not collapse on paper, it collapses because of structural issues, design issues, materials issues, and even the type of soil that the building is located in. It is not just about professionals, there are also sub professionals – the artisans.
Poor electrical installation may burn the whole house. Poor plumbing work may make the whole building unsustainable. We should approach building collapse in a multi approach. Government should empower the regulatory agencies. It is not to recruit staff alone, they should be empowered to also know what they are doing and to also know what they are supposed to do.
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