CHALLENGES OF EDUCATION PROPERTY MAINTENANCE 

Despite decades of evolution of building infrastructure design, construction and maintenance in Nigeria, the country is still faced with a myriad of fundamental problems and challenges in the industry especially, in the property maintenance business of educational infrastructure. The challenges can be grouped into the following broad categories:

a)         Socio-cultural challenges: This is one of the biggest challenges to effective facility maintenance of building infrastructure in Nigeria. It is known that Nigerians generally have a poor maintenance culture. This has contributed immensely to the prevailing neglect of property maintenance of education building infrastructure in the tertiary institution. It is seen as a waste of enterprise to spend resources maintaining a building unless significant malfunctioning of any of its components occurs (Odediran S.J., Opatunji O.A. and Eghenure F.O, 2012).

b)         Technical challenges: There are several technical challenges that have militated against effective facility maintenance of educational infrastructure in Nigeria. These technical challenges include:

                                            i.      Building design flaws: Poorly designed buildings are more expensive to maintain. Besides, typical building designs in Nigeria usually do not incorporate human factors engineering and maintenance considerations. These design flaws makes facility maintenance of these components to be expensive with much higher resource requirements and could discourage the execution of (preventive) maintenance activities.

                                          ii.      Errors during building construction: Poor supervision and unauthorized changes in design during the building infrastructure construction often distorts facility maintenance elements of the design thus making the execution of the later after commissioning to be cumbersome.

                                        iii.      Poor defect diagnostic ability and limited technical knowledge. Professional facility management practice in Nigeria is still at its infancy stage of development. There are very few professional facility managers and facility management companies in Nigeria. Consequently, the required defect diagnostic skill as well as overall technical knowledge for effective facility maintenance of building infrastructure is still lacking amongst many people currently involved in facility management practice of building infrastructure in Nigeria.

                                        iv.      Weak standards and poor enforcement of standards: Nigeria’s building codes and laws are weak and needs improvement especially in the areas of human factors engineering and the incorporation of facility maintenance elements in building design. Improvements in the building codes and standards needs to made and also dutifully enforced especially during building construction.

                                          v.      Poor quality of building materials: There is abundance of fake and sub-standard building materials in Nigeria. This is partly responsible for the relatively high failure mode of building infrastructure components in Nigeria and the consequent high frequency of replacement of malfunctioning or defective components. This has facility maintenance cost in the country to be high and discouraging.

                                        vi.      Economic challenges: Facility management cost of building infrastructure in Nigeria is very high (because of the factors discussed above). This tends to discourage the few people and mostly corporate organizations that try to practice facility maintenance of buildings. The preponderance of fake and sub-standards building materials, limited technical knowledge of professional facility maintenance/management of building infrastructure, frequent re-work, etc, have all contributed to reduce the application and growth of facility maintenance of building infrastructure in Nigeria.