Enforce construction industry laws

THE Minister of Roads and Highways, Mr Amin Amidu Sulemana, has underscored the need for the construction industry to be formally regulated, explaining that lack of enforcement of regulations for the industry had led to shoddy work by players in the sector.
He said the lack of enforcement of building and construction regulations had resulted in low ethical standards.
He made the comments at the opening ceremony of a two-day workshop aimed at sanitising and regulating the construction industry.
The workshop was organised by the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) – Ghana, a group of professional builders in the country.
“People are now cutting corners at the expense of quality,” the minister said, and thus challenged the CIOB to help flush out the miscreants in the industry.
He further called on all stakeholders to join in the fight to ensure that the industry was properly sanitised and regulated.
The Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing, Alhaji Collins Dauda said eventhough there were enough rules to sanitise the industry,  the lack of its enforcement posed a great challenge and thus called on all stakeholders to help in sustaining efforts aimed at ensuring that this challenge was fully resolved.
He stressed the need for another look at the issuance of permits to developers stressing that any difficulty would result in people devising other means of building, which accounted for various buildings springing up without permits.
The Center Chair of the Chartered Institute of Building, Ghana, Mr Rockson Dogbegah said the forum was imperative to check defects in newly built buildings as a matter of urgency to forestall any impending disaster.
“It is important to check defects in newly built schools and roads and it is important for surveyors, architects planers, engineers and government to deliberate on how to prevent such tragedies from occurring again,” he said.
He explained that lessons drawn from the collapse of buildings was a wake-up call to do something about buildings which were fast springing up, making reference to the collapse of the Melcom building in Accra last year.
 He thus stressed the need  to review protocols and make recommendations to help grow the industry which he said was at its infant stage adding “Ghana will not evolve organically, it has to be built.”
Mr Dogbegah also explained the need to “change the urban landscape of the country to a nation on the rise moving to a new future of prosperity and progress that regulated its construction industry with enforcement of laws to avoid dire consequences.”
He also said total disregard for compliance with regulations, undue delay in securing permits, changes in the use of structures for which licenses had been granted without proper permit and appropriate technical adjustments must all cease.