NIGERIA is losing over N30 billion yearly to non-compliance to internationally accepted safety standards by employers, businesses and employees, the Institute of Safety Professionals of Nigeria (ISPON), has said.
Its Chairman, Lagos State branch, Timothy Iwuagwu, said loss could run into trillions, considering the fact that most safety incidents are either un-reported or under-reported in the country.
He also said lives lost to work-related accidents caused by gross negligence to proper corporate safety processes cannot be quantified in monetary term. Besides, the bulk of those at work, he said, are self employed; they are mostly operators in the informal sector who do not heed the guidelines regarding safety at work.
Iwuagwu, who spoke on the sidelines of the “5th Nigerian Safety Award for Excellence Hall of Fame (9ja SAFE Awards)/Fire-fighters’ Appreciation Dinner 2019” in Lagos, bemoaned inadequate regulation of the industry, blaming it on dearth of professionals.
“The Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) industry is not adequately regulated, because we are grossly deficient in the number of professionals in Nigeria. Secondly, we don’t have people with the technical understanding of the necessity to have established safety monitoring systems,” he said.
Iwuagwu, who is also a retired Naval Engineer and former Head of Security and Safety Practices Management Department of the Armed Forces Centre, said although, there are laws to regulate the safety industry, those in positions of authority lacked the will power to implement them.
“People on positions of authority who are supposed to leverage on existing laws and statutory guidelines to regulate the industry lack the will to implement the laws, even though monetisation of non-compliance can also help the federating units generate revenue for themselves and the nation,” he said.
The safety expert and member of the 9ja SAFE Awards Technical Team, said for this year’s award, his team recommended mostly companies based on their compliance to internationally accepted safety standards.
He said because safety is still evolving in Nigeria and the level of safety consciousness is low, his team, in selecting the awardees, adopted some parts of the internationally accepted standards and domesticated them within the limits of Nigeria’s industrial environment.
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