President Bola Tinubu has called for stronger engineering regulation, effective enforcement and proportionate sanctions to protect lives and improve infrastructure quality nationwide, telling the 34th Engineering Assembly of the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria that regulation must shift from reactive to preventive, data driven and genuinely enforceable.
Represented by Minister of Works David Umahi at the Abuja event, themed Advancing Public Safety in Nigeria through Strategic Engineering Regulation, Enforcement and a Tiered Sanction Regime, Tinubu said engineering safety extends beyond roads, bridges, buildings, dams, power systems and digital infrastructure to the child walking to school, the trader travelling to market, the patient rushed to hospital and every Nigerian who depends on public infrastructure, arguing engineering failures cost lives, waste investment and erode public confidence, making safety the first principle of engineering practice. He described COREN as a public safety institution rather than a punitive one, arguing regulation should not be seen as punishment but as protection, protecting the public from incompetence, clients from poor delivery, government from waste, investors from failed infrastructure and, most importantly, protecting lives, and said regulation must span every phase of infrastructure delivery from planning and design through construction, supervision, maintenance and eventual decommissioning. Every road project we are doing has a life span of between 50 and 100 years, he said, a complete departure from previous practice where most roads never lasted up to five years, insisting Nigeria needs a balanced system of strong regulation, fair enforcement and proportionate sanctions to achieve genuine engineering excellence.
COREN President Zubair Abubakar, delivering the welcome address, said the assembly’s theme reflects the council’s statutory duty to protect the public through effective regulation, noting engineering failures often carry devastating consequences that make robust compliance monitoring, enforcement and accountability essential to professional practice. He highlighted several council achievements, including introducing admission quotas for engineering programmes with the National Universities Commission and JAMB to improve education quality, intensifying nationwide compliance inspections on infrastructure projects and industrial facilities, strengthening enforcement against unsafe practices, expanding digital registration and verification services, enhancing professional development programmes, developing engineering codes and standards, strengthening international partnerships, and introducing engineering intelligence and risk based regulation to catch potential failures before they occur. Despite this progress, he identified persistent quackery, weak compliance with standards, weak enforcement mechanisms, infrastructure deterioration and rapid technological change as major ongoing challenges. We must move from reactive regulation to predictive and preventive engineering governance, he said, urging stakeholders toward strategic regulation, risk based inspection, ethical practice, technology driven systems and stronger collaboration.
Dangote Group President and Chief Executive Aliko Dangote, represented by Group Chief Economist Hassan Mahmoud, described engineering as a public trust whose success determines public safety, industrial growth and investor confidence, arguing engineering excellence has become a strategic economic imperative for Nigeria as it works to close its infrastructure deficit and position itself as an industrial hub under the African Continental Free Trade Area. Effective regulation, he argued, should anticipate risk rather than merely respond to failure. Good regulation is an investment enabler, he said, countries that attract long term capital are those where investors trust engineering standards because quality engineering reduces risk and life cycle costs, drawing on the Dangote Refinery project as an example where safety and engineering discipline were embedded in every decision, since maintaining high standards costs far less than the consequences of failure. Dangote also advocated transparent, proportionate sanctions that distinguish administrative error from professional negligence and deliberate misconduct while maintaining zero tolerance for repeated violations that endanger lives, urging regulators to tackle institutional problems such as poor procurement systems, political interference and disregard for professional advice, since effective regulation should address the root causes of engineering failure rather than simply punishing offenders after the fact.
