Mike Igini
1 October 2007
interview
Lagos — Dr. Femi Olomola was one of the frontline Town Planners honoured recently by the Lagos State chapter of the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners.
His firm, Femi Olomola & Co., was honoured with an award for excellence as a distinguished planning firm in campus planning. In the citation read at the occasion, Dr. Olomola, who is also the President of the Association of Town Planning Consultants of Nigeria (ATOPCON), was credited with the preparation of six master-plans acceptable to the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) which formed the basis for the issuance of operating licences to the institutions.
They are: Lagos City Polytechnic, which prides itself as the first private polytechnic in the country (1995), Grace Polytechnic, Nigerian Institute of Journalism, Ogba, Ronik Polytechnic, Ejigbo, all in Lagos, Allover Central Polytechnic, Sango-Ota in Ogun State and Fidel Polytechnic, Gboko in Benue State.
The firm has also prepared the campus master-plan for three other polytechnics whose licences are yet to be issued by the NBTE. In the university sector, Femi Olomola & Co. is also working on the master-plans of three yet to be licenced universities. They are: Chariot University, Osi in Kwara State, Elim University of Education in Imo State and South Western University, Ijebu-Ode in Ogun. Assistant Property and Environment editor, Jude Njoku, spoke to Dr Olomola, a one-time chairman of the chapter after the event on what campus planning entails.
WHAT are the basic variables in preparing the master-plan for tertiary institutions
The first critical variable is land. If you are preparing for a polytechnic, it is 50 hectares, that is the minimum requirement, but for a university, the minimum is 100 hectares. After that, there must be a survey plan prepared by a Land Surveyor, showing the size of the land.
When I am talking of 50 and 100 hectares, it is only the Land Surveyor who has the professional responsibility to actually state the size of the land and give us a drawing which will show the shape of the land, the length, the contour and configuration. That's another critical variable. After that, there must be an academic plan in place before you can prepare a master-plan. Some people call it academic brief.
There must be one on the table and that academic plan will now give you the details of the students population of the proposed institution over a period of time, the estimated number of academic and non-academic staff and the list of the various faculties and departments that would be available.
All these are now translated into what we call space needs or space schedule. From there, you would be able to know how many square metres of area you need to develop offices for the lecturers in a faculty, students' housing, the library, the audio-visual centre and every other thing which has to do with the campus. You can always extract and compute data from the academic plan. It will tell us the number of students that will use the library; out of the total number of students, there is a percentage that can be at the library at a particular time. That gives you an idea of how many square metres of library space that you need.
Thereafter, you do what we call the socio-economic survey of the area. Assuming the school will be sited at Ago-Iwoye in Ogun State, you need to get some data about what are the existing facilities in Ago-Iwoye. Are there banks? What aspect of students' needs can be met within the community and, where they cannot be met, you need to make additional provision in the master-plan. You need to conceptualize the master-plan within the broad setting of the community where it would be located. After this, you will do a site analysis.
After these, you can now begin to get your pen on paper and start putting your drawings together. Eventually, you will come up with a sketch of the plan. You will produce about two to three sketches which you will present to your colleagues or the client. Thereafter, you do what we call evaluation of the alternatives.
Whichever alternative you pick, you now develop that into the final master-plan. Thereafter, you go into the phasing of the master-plan. At this stage, you now bring in other consultants like the Quantity Surveyor who will give you an idea of the cost of executing the project, the Civil Engineer will come in to put in the roads, drainage, etc, the Electrical Engineer will talk to you about the transformers needed to cope with the load of the school, the street lightings and so on. Generally, you get all these things into a package before submitting it along with some other documents to the NUC (if it is a university).
If it is a polytechnic, you take it to the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), which processes it eventually and checks their own standards there. If it is okay, they now use it as a basis for granting approval.
Assuming a university or polytechnic wants to run a multi-campus system, would it still require the same land size?
I think so. The NUC allows this and the totality of the land must still be 100 hectares. Like we have the new Osun State University; it is a multi-campus university wherein they have campuses in Ikiri, one in Okuku and another one in Oshogbo. But, I must remark that running a multi-campus university system is quite expensive and I don't think NUC will kindly look at it because you tend to overstretch the facilities. If you have a campus many miles away, you still need to provide a library for them there. There has to be a mini-registrar's office, bursar's office to collect money from students. It is very expensive to run.
From the citation, it does seem virtually all the projects you handled are privately owned institutions. Does it mean you don't have government's patronage or is it that they don't prepare master-plans for their tertiary institutions?
(A long breath) What a good question really! I don't really know. I think, probably, when it comes to government institutions, honestly, they don't follow the rules as well as the private sector does. For the private sector person who wants to establish a university, he/she first goes to the NUC where they will give him/her the guidelines and you follow it meticulously. You dare not pronounce yourself as a university or polytechnic without having secured NUC or NBTE approval.
But, in the case of government institutions, they first of all make the declaration. I am not sure if the private sector wants to establish a multi-campus private university like the Osun State University, the NUC will grant the approval. I suspect that because it is a government-owned institution, they (NUC) tend to be more relaxed. Again, you have to understand government very well and probably be a card-carrying member of the ruling political party in that state. Probably, you need to be an indigene of that state.
There are so many variables there which, in most cases, don't really make it easy for somebody to walk in. But, when you are working with the private sector, it is a different story. You should give them an example of what you have done. I have done one, two, three, four , five, it builds up his confidence and he gives you the job. If you do it well, he will even be the one to recommend you to another potential proprietor. That could be the reason and, honestly, I am not a government person.
Are these master-plans mainly for the purposes of getting approval to commence operations or are they adhered to, that is implemented?
Primarily, the first objective of preparing the plan is to fulfill NUC's or NBTE's condition for the issuance of an operating licence. That is absolutely the critical point when the submission is being made. Secondly, it is an instrument or document that is supposed to guide the development of the campus, say, over the next 20 -25 years. Personally, considering the huge amount of money spent in preparing it, I don't see any potential proprietor having got it, then abandoning it because it ensures an orderly development of the campus. By the time you prepare a master-plan, a lot of factors have been taken into account.
Where should the recreational areas be? Where should the academic halls be, where should the staff quarters be, where should the nursery school be? There are so many things -the library, the Students Union centre or build-ing, the Bursary, the shopping centre. It is like a whole town, a whole community on its own and, professionally, a lot of factors would have been taken into account in the location and positioning of the proposed buildings on the master-plan. So, when you suddenly abandon it, you are bargaining for chaos.
You may discover that the Governing Council, without being guided, may just decide and say, put this faculty here. Tomorrow, they may wake up again and say I want the market or shopping centre here. At the end of the day, there would be chaos. You may have a situation where they position a Students' Union building next to a lecture room.
It is not really the best because students will play their noisy music and all that. In many of the master-plan which we prepare, we always want to locate the recreational facilities, the sports arena, the football field, etc, very near the entrance of the University because, since you will be interacting with members of the public, we would rather want members of the public to come and watch the match at the entrance to the campus and, at the end, go out of the campus. You don't need to go inside and see too much of the campus.
Locating the stadium right inside the campus is a big security risk. What if, at the end of the match, God forbids, there is a riot, a lot of things would be destroyed. But, if it is at the entrance, the security personnel can easily flush them out. Let's also look at the location of the Staff School. Because members of the public can also use the facility, they can bring their children to the staff school as well. We always locate the staff school near the entrance gate so that the parents can drop their children and just veer off on the road without having to go into the campus.
With population on capmuses almost exploding beyond limits, areas meant to be open spaces now have building springing up on them. Are these not violations of the master-plans?
Actually, the point you made is very accurate. We have situations in the country now whereby some Universities, contrary to what is contained in their master-plan, now have more part-time students than full time students. A good case study would be the Lagos State University (LASU).
I understand that the number of part time students is probably ten times the number of full-time students. Go to Anthony Village, where they have one of their campuses or go to Jibowu, as far as I am concerned, they constitute a nuisance, a very big environmental nuisance there on weekends. And I am sure Lagos State government would not allow a private-sector university or a polytechnic to have a campus that would create as much nuisance as they now create in all these zones where they have their study centres.
Go to Anthony on a weekend, you can't park your car, you can't even walk. They have actually saturated and flooded the whole area. All the amenities in that area have been completely wiped off because of the location of that campus there.
If you look at the LASU master-plan, I am not sure and I can even say it very clearly, that particular location is not an integral part of the campus and you begin to ask yourself, if a private sector man comes that he wants a change of use of all the buildings there into educational with that intensity of use, Lagos State government will say no. But, because they are the alpha and omega, that is why they are doing what they are doing with impunity.
I am not even sure they got a change of use application through for that use. The one in Jibowu as well. I want to ask them, did they have a change of use from residential use to educational before they started using that property? It is an example of when government use their powers with impunity.
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