'How to check infrastructural failures'

Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, says stiff punishments should be meted out to unprofessional engineers as a measure to check infrastructural failures.

Speaking at the just concluded 29th Engineering Assembly in Abuja, Fashola, charged the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria to regularly deregister practitioners in the industry involved in unethical practices.

Represented by the Minister of State for Works and Housing, Abubakar Aliyu, Fashola said the unprofessional or unethical engineer must be promptly sanctioned in accordance with the rule of law to prevent them from adversely affecting our national posterity objectives.

“I learnt that some engineers were recently deregistered for professional misconduct to serve as a deterrent to others. I believe these sanctions need to be carried out regularly and necessary to avoid infrastructural failures,” he added.

Earlier, the National President of the Nigerian Society of Engineers, Mr Ali Rabiu, had commended President Muhammadu Buhari for signing Executive Order 5 said it was now easy to chase out quacks from the profession.

“Before the new law was signed, we could do nothing, but the new law has given us more power to chase out quacks from our profession.

“That is why we inaugurated Engineering Regulation Monitoring. They will go to sites to monitor personnel; they monitor whether they are engineers, technologists, technicians or craftsmen and if quacks are detected, we will take them to a court of competent jurisdiction and prosecute them,” he said.