Antonia Beri who runs her our business as a safety consultant studied Chemical Engineering at the Howard University in the United States. She has practiced for 25 years working as a lead consultant and facilitator with basic training in safety instrumented systems. In this interview, she takes Bukola Afolabi into her world.
WHILE in the US, Antonia Beri worked as a process engineer for MERCK SHARP & DOHM and MONSANTO CHEMICAL garnering skills in regulatory compliance, GMP and Root Cause Analysis, especially in the area of process design and safety. Prior to that, she was a consultant in help safety enviroment (HSE) with particular emphasis in process, manufacturing and environmental safety in several countries.
Her vast experience spans different industrial areas like technical safety reviews and she has certification in the design and specification of Life and Fire Safety Systems in line with national fire protection association (NFPA) and British Standards (BS).
You said you have been doing this for 25 years; how did you start and why did you decide to go into this area?
As an engineer I worked in the United States for a while and I picked an interest in process safety and safety as a whole because I found out it was a mandatory aspect for all. In other words, there was no exception to that and you couldn’t justify against the standard. The bench mark were meant for people to follow so I was interested in how it helps both the community and the company in staying long time and being in harmony with each other.
You studied in the United States and you started this in Nigeria. How many years ago was this?
That was about 12 years ago
So how is business going?
Great! We are making progress, people are getting more educated about safety and they are eager to know the issues that affect them and their daily lives, in their family both at home and at work. So it is interesting to see the change in mind and the change in philosophy and watch how people think it is important to them. When we started out, not much value was given to that and people thought it was for a certain class or category of people. But day in, day out we are still educating the client and we are impressed at how people perceive it and how they see the value it has added to their lives.
What are some of the challenges?
Ignorance is the greatest challenge. We live in a very unsafe environment and we don’t appreciate the risk we are taking, so the greatest challenge is the mind. And the next one is the legislature and the operating system from the government. Yes the law might be there, but are they are enforced? They are not even practiced and so when you are talking to people about what their rights are they don’t even know their right and their merits. And even when they are violated (the big corporations are violating that), there is no enforcement from the government. We can actually say that in the last two years that there has been a change in both areas, especially in Lagos State.
How can we make it more effective than this because Nigerians are not safety conscious and how do you want to get us more educated about these things?
All of us go through a school system. I think the fundamental base of that is the educational system, imbibing these values as part of our educational culture which will actually ensure that the younger ones are informed. By the time a child goes home and informs the parents this is not safe or that we were told in school that this is not right, it can translate positively to the society at large. The other way of doing it is to go into the community during shows and during events and to talk to people about their safety because it is actually very affordable at the home level.
It is about getting more people to know about it. The good thing is that as we are becoming a more enlightened society, in the sense of the growth in the middle class, people are beginning to know and ask for that. These days we have an influx of a lot of people from overseas who come to settle and they are used to certain things and they are beginning to ask if we can continuously work in educating the masses. We can make more progress because we are coming from top and from bottom and somewhere we would make it.
You are moving from fire safety to environmental safety which is the rudimentary aspect of safety, why this slight change?
This is because they work hand in hand. When you look at fire safety, if you are in a building, you already have a solution from that building that goes into that environment. They work hand in hand so what you are seeing is expanding the base and looking at safety in a holistic manner including fire safety, food safety, construction safety and environmental safety because they are intertwined and it is important that we bring in a holistic perspective so that we have a safer environment.
What is the difference between environmental and fire safety?
When you say safety, you are saying safety from harm that means you are still obtaining undesired events in your environment. Under safety, we now have different branches of safety. One is the environment which deals with the living and the non-living aspects of the environment. My environment for example is the air I breathe. So when you have air pollution, you are talking about environmental safety. If you have fire and the fire is burning somewhere, you are carrying the smoke over even though it is the genesis of the fire, the solution can actually cause suffocation. So you look at it holistically from that point. When we talk on that, the reason we focus more on it is that usually it is the most occurrence that you find even at homes. You know you just have a child who got burnt, you forgot to turn off the generator and it catches fire and all that.
Sometimes you are even driving a car and you get into bump, how can we describe the experience and what should be done to victims?
Unfortunately, the victims are usually the masses because in our society the privileged are almost able to afford anything. So in the case of an emergency they are usually evacuated, but the masses are at the receiving end. You just mentioned the case of driving, you are driving and you have a pot hole on the road, it is an unsafe environment and you can have an accident and die. I think the government should be held responsible because you are paying your taxes. The government should actually come in and take care of your family and offer compensation and take care of other things. You now find the dead bodies here and there, and the family is looking all over the place for the body for a befitting burial and they don’t even get that, they probably may not be able to locate it because we don’t even have an emergency response source to cater for this. So, unfortunately the masses are at the receiving end of all these negative consequences of an unsafe environment.
What we are working with so far is telling. When we go into offices, we are talking to people about safety; we go into offices and talk with people who are already conscious and compliant, we try to educate them beyond their office boundaries. You don’t stay safe only at work; you stay safe for your kids. As a mother, I want to be safe for my kids more than my job because they need me more than the job. They can get somebody else to do my job but my kids can’t have another mother, so looking at it from that perspective and you are pushing it on a personal level for them to take it home.
What do you think is the cause and how can we prevent it?
It is very easy because it is preventable. In the first place, we build homes and 99.9 percent of them are well spaced. If I have to go and rent a flat, I will look at where the generator house is vis-a-vis where the apartment is, if it is too close, I’m not renting the flat. So what is that telling the landlord? When you are building your house, be conscious of where you are placing these things. In fact, in the design stage of most of our projects, we can actually design out a lot of unsafe conditions. The gas stand should stay away from the house, but in the average home it is under the cooking table; you are living with a danger.
How can government make things better or implement policies in this area?
At the inception, I spoke with the Lagos State Safety Commission and we are looking at building codes and standards and how to make them complaint with Lagos State. We are also working with different governments like Sokoto State and doing a proposal on what we can do in the sense that the safety for the governor at that point. When you now start working with key leaders in that light, you are actually helping protect them and further employ more. When you ask some the emergency number of Lagos State, it’s there and it works but I can assure you that as many as 85 to 90 percent of people don’t know. So the government is trying but we would have to work with the government.
You are going to Ghana for an event. What is it all about?
It is on environmental safety in the oil and gas industry. I know it is a very controversial issue, so what we are actually trying to preach there is how to prevent it. How to clean up. How to have an emergency response system so that it doesn’t affect it. The problem is if the government is speaking out of interest and the community is speaking out of interest, then the interest of the common person is not taken care of because none of these are common people.
