8 ANTICS OF SUPPLIERS AND CONTRACTORS.

If you are not on site for your building project in our environment, it takes a lot to get the best result. Building is serious work in our environment. If you don’t have the time, you should have the money or vice versa. You can be in want of this two things, otherwise you won’t get anywhere. The situation in the industry is quite bad too.

Recently a friend of mine, an architect, embarked on a project. He had made inquiries pertaining to blocks at the initial stage of the project, he found out blocks of 9 inches were sold for N180, but just before the start of the project he sent his staff to also enquire, he was also told it was N180. Note that this his staff was with him on the day he made the initial enquiry. He eventually found out that just close to his site, he could get blocks for N170 each. Therefore, his staff who confirmed the N180 would have made for instance a million naira from N10 on every block, if an average of 1,000 were purchased.

You may say it’s an unwritten rule for contractors to have their own share, even at the point of contracting them. But is it right? You may ask, can’t my friend just let that N10? Is it part of the contingencies that come with the business? Because I understand that even in supermarket and super stores some percentage provision is made for theft and all that. This is quite alarming, and kills business.

Here I would want to examine some of the antics employed, how to address them, as well as secure yourself or reduce your exposure. You may not be able to totally eradicate it, but you can reduce the occurrence in your case to the barest minimum. Fundamentally, your choice of the contractor matters a lot, this determine how your whole project pans out. Therefore, you must know the things you take into cognizance when employing one.

Antics of some contractors, suppliers, and workmen on construction site:

1.       Most contractors want to get the job at almost any cost, so once you have given them something for instance, they know it will probably cost N30,000, they will quote N17,500, knowing that their competition will bring in a quote of N30, 000. This is just so he gets the job.

Once he gets the job, he will say he forgot to add certain items. You are not the expert, you don’t know the things he’ll need for the job. He’ll leave these key things out, only to include them at the latter stage. By the time these latter items are added, the quotation would have come to N30,000 or more.

Now depending on how or who you engaged, you may not be able to back out at this point.

 2.       They out rightly steal. Between the contractor, supplier, and workmen, they can steal you to ‘stupor’ if you are not careful and unaware. This act takes place in many ways, because they connive, that’s why its important you get a security house, a   storage where you can keep things and probably engage a security person. The parties involved act out the whole theft, cooperating with one another.

3.       They work less for standard pay if not well supervised. The bricklayer has his daily pay per day, that is there is a standard day’s job and a standard day’s pay. If you don’t monitor or aren’t careful they will be on your site for the eight hour duration of a day’s job, but will not really do a day’s job. Therefore they will take a longer time to finish the project, and collect more money by so doing.

4.       The contractors are fond of engaging inexperienced or unskilled people, so that they can pay less. The ones who probably know the job, collect much more. So they take the contract and seek cheap and unskilled labour. I admit that we have problem with workmen in our country, because vocational institutions have not really supplied the appropriate skill for the industry. There again, there are still those of them who can do the job, but contractors bypass them and hire the unskilled workers for less pay.

I know of someone who wanted to fix tiles in her sitting room, she says she sought a professional for the job, but the professional was going to charge her more money, so she then looked out for someone who is good enough, but whom she will pay less.

She admits that she spent more money with the second person than she would have paid the professional. This person in question charges her the first time and she pays, but he comes back later to include all other kinds of items he says he needs and to say that the price has changed. Again she says she wouldn’t have had to supervise the professional on the job, but with the second person she had to.

5.       Suppliers deliberately supply your items in short quantities. For example iron bars and all of that, there is supposed to be a standard supply of iron metals and sheets on the construction site, and usually because these things are purchased in bulk, one may not have the patience to count these things. A dozen for example will be stacked as eleven or ten unknown to you.

Another common one is the truck loads of sand, where you would be told this truck load is five, ten, or twenty tons, but they are never ever complete. So you always spend more for less. There has been cases where they spend more money and buy more, this may due to inexperience or the person is trying to play safe, and by so doing ‘over provide’, and have excess at the end of the construction.

I must say that in making quotations for building materials, you should always leave room for contingencies.

When this excess occurs, there is a way of dealing with them such that you can still get back some money. Beware that your contractor doesn’t do this behind your back, because he will pocket the money. Well, it could be appropriate, and it may not be appropriate, depending on the terms of the contract.

 6.       Contractors also deliberately purchase inferior materials, cheaper items or items not up to specification. For example, you are supposed to use a 10mm steel, they may go for less. When you are supposed to use 12mm they buy 10mm, because 10mm is definitely cheaper than 12mm.  They pocket the difference without using the specified item for your project. This calls to question the integrity of the construction, little wonder we have collapsed buildings every now and again.

 7.       If they get wind of the level of your documentation for the building, especially if its not complete or still in process. For example Building Approval in a place like Lagos, they can actually go and raise fake government officials to harass you on site, and to extort money from you. Before you realise it, you would have been paying money to nobody. It happens a lot, therefore the need to guard against it.

 8.       They short circuit some stages of the building process or requirement to save money. For example, you want German floor, they will need to put certain things like nylon in place before pouring the concrete to seal off the water from contaminating the wall; even before putting paving stones to stop grass from growing.

They may have quoted for it and collected the money for it, but if you are not there as at the time they are doing that, they can just pocket the money for that, and just go on with doing a bad job on the German floor I gave you as an example. Imagine building just walls, then later coming to put German floors, its not standard process.

This list is not exhaustive, but should enlighten one about the shady thing happening on construction sites. All of these schemes are designed to make money off the person building anyway and anyhow. Don’t be deterred, there are ways of guarding against all these antics, or at least to bring it to a minimal level if you want to construct a building.

What do you think ?