Having been in the private sector for that long, I’m sureas a town planner you had periods of frustration with some government agencies in a bid to obtain approval for a client?
One of the things I learnt here is the marked difference between the public and private sector. In the private sector, processes are usually faster, goals are faster accomplished not because it is necessarily more organised, but because there is focus and you deal with less bureaucracy.
In some cases the private sector does not have a wide spectrum of personnel that public sector has but within the limited resources they have, they are focused, they are goal oriented and as such they are faster. In the public sector, I discovered that we have a wide spectrum of human resources and that probably is a plus for the public service, but there is also the bureaucracy and the hierarchy of positions where files must pass through the subordinate, to the superior officer and it goes on like that probably until you get to the governor. It makes it slower than the private sector.
So, I find the public sector not totally inefficient. Its efficiency is just slow. All that needs to be done really is to increase some speed and that will bring me to what I have now done as a private sector person. I’ll tell you the way I work here. I’ve been in the commissioner’s office before I got here and I know the loads of file that you are likely to see in their registry that makes members of the public look for an easy way out and get their files to the attention of the commissioner.
What have you done differently in terms of time saving to stop people from short cuts?
I have a principle which works for me; files don’t sleep in my office except there is a particular reason to keep a file or is waiting for one activity to be completed somewhere, I treat files within 24 hours. The files I’m about treating today should have been treated yesterday, but because I was away to Abuja, that is why those files are there. Ordinarily, they would have been out, so there isn’t that opportunity for anyone to come to my office to request that their file be brought from bottom to the top.
When I don’t finish my files, I take them home; by the time I’m coming tomorrow they are done. So, that gives me the courage to ask any officer, what are those files doing in your office? With that I have been able to increase speed. Unfortunately, as a consultant it took me five years to get approval six floor building.
But under my watch, we’ve been able to process a 15 floor approval in three months.
What is the solution to obtaining quick approvals for building construction?
One of the major steps we are taking is the pre-submission screening process. What that intends to achieve for us is to remove bottle neck before they become bottle neck. Applications have been stored in our office for reasons of non-tax compliance, deficiency in design, non compliance with some design standard. We take those applications in and it is only when they have started the process that we now begin to write the comment; go and correct it. And you know it is like when you are driving along an express with other vehicles and you have a malfunction in your vehicle by the time you park either to check your vehicle or you want to ease yourself and you get back to the road, you may never catch them again because by the time you now get back to the road there may now be some blockages, hindrances, there may just be a reason you can’t attain the speed on which you were before. It’s the same thing, when somebody has started a process and then you now run a comment on it when he goes back, he may not come back with the same zeal which he brought in.
So what the prescreening does is that, we won’t allow you to bring it in if it is not likely to get approved so from the initial stage we check all of your drawing, if you are not okay we tell you not to come in. At that point we have not asked you to pay.
We are also saying go and fulfill all your statutory obligations ensure your taxes are paid, you have your titled document. So when you have all them ready, you now come to us.
Have you been able to achieve the 30-day approval plan target?
The 30-day target was set a long time ago; now people get their approval within two weeks in this ministry on my watch. We have made available relevant information on our website to make the process less cumbersome, we are moving on to e-planning submission where you don’t need to see us physically.
Why is there so much change of use of buildings in the state?
I want to let you know that there is no processing of papers for change of use anymore but we must understand the dynamics of a settlement. Settlement is like a living organism and it needs to be understood and planned for.
Ikorodu Road, for instance, was designated residential when the population of Lagos was less than four million but now that is designed as a 10-lane road it is unreasonable to still call it a residential area because it has been built up as a business area. By the time an area become dual carriage roads you have increased the speed of traffic and have turned it into a high street. The idea is that we must be ready to accommodate growth. But even at that uses are not changed without permission.
But you can’t say that about Ikeja GRA as there are many change of use and they claim to have permission from you?
Before Ikeja GRA became what it is today, commercial vehicles were not allowed to drive into the area. The only vehicles that went into GRA in those days were either private cars or taxis, but with increase in population, especially with the Secretariat, a demand for regular transportation became imminent. As we develop as megacity, land value is also increasing. When Ikeja GRA was created, nobody envisaged that Lagos would become this large. Now, it makes little sense what the plots of land were then because many of the houses were built on an acre (Six plots) and there were bungalows.
Land values have changed and become more expensive when people acquired it. You can’t expect them not to make gain from it by turning it into a commercial outfit. No doubt that at some point land value in those places increased to a non-reasonable level such that for an investor when you eventually buy a parcel of land, you are not thinking of just one limited development but multiple structures. For instance, if an investor purchased 1,000 square metres of land in Ikoyi for N1.6billion, what kind of building do you expect him to put up? Definitely, it can be a bungalow, but high-rise that would give him return on investment. Realistically, we are trying to work on reviewing quite a no of our schemes because land values have gone up.
That is why we are working on a number of model master plans for certain areas because the government is embarking on providing massive infrastructure in the newly planned schemes. For us in the state government, real estate is important because the bulk of our Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) is from there and we want to give the best of it.
On the heels of the new model plans what is the new height approval for Ikoyi, Victoria Island and Lekki buildings?
We are approving 15 floors maximally for Ikoyi, Lekki and Victoria Island. We are proposing 10 floors but they are still under review.
