In another exciting edition of the program YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD AND YOU, we bring you another huge session with an interesting personality in person of Mrs Fumilola Helen Fakorede FNIS.

Host – Hello good morning and welcome to your program ‘your Neighbourhood and You’ which is a weekly program on Breez 91.9FM. Your Neighbourhood and You program is designed specifically to enlighten the populace about the environment and town planning related issues. As you all know, town planning is the process of managing land resources. It involves the control of existing and new development as well as strategy preparations to manage future requirement. It is also dynamic process that changes the responds of policy development, proposals and local needs. So, in view of this, we will be shedding more light on this program, your neighborhood and you. I will be introducing my sponsor of the program, Tpl Ogunseyi Ayodele Joseph.

Sponsor: Good morning, Comfort how are you?

Host: I am very well good morning and good morning to our listeners. Before I introduce our guest today, let me quickly run through her profile. Ladies and gentlemen, you are welcome officially to Your Neighbourhood and You. Today we will be having the present chairman of Nigeria Institution of Surveyors in Ondo State. She is no other person than Surveyor (Mrs) Fumilola Helen Fakorede FNIS. Glad to have you on the program this morning ma

Guest: It’s my pleasure, good morning, Comfort.

Host: Surveyor (Mrs) Funmilola Helen Fakorede was born about 55 years ago into the family of Ayodele of Akure. She is a seasoned surveyor of almost 20 years in private practice. she is the first female registered surveyor in Ondo state and the first woman to privately practice the profession of surveying in Ondo state. She is the first and only female surveyor from Ondo state to be vested a fellow of the Nigerian institution of surveyors and she is presently the chairman of Nigeria Institution of Surveyors in Ondo state. She is happily married with children and grandchild. She is a grandmother. She is a Fellow of Nigeria Institution of Surveyor.

Host: Our sponsor, what do you have to tell our listeners today?

Sponsor: Good morning, Comfort once again. To our listeners, I guess they will get more information about surveying today, they will know the processing, as well as the difference between a registered surveyor and quack one. At the end of today’s program, they will be more informed about their environment.

Host: Ma, can you explain what surveying and geo-informatic is all about?

Guest: Thank you very much, Surveying and Geo-informatic deals with profession that measures, acquire data, process, store and present it. This data is as the act of all spatially references data that you can imagine. In our lay man language, surveying is about the measurement of the position of structures on, below or above the earth surface and it is a process whereby you process the data you acquire and present it in form of map, plan, section etc for the end users.

Sponsor: What are the roles of Surveyors in Urban Development?

Guest: The role of surveyors in urban development is inexhaustible. In any development, the surveyors are the first professionals to enter into such a site or field. Survey is the bedrock of any meaningful development. When we talk of urban development, the surveyors are the first to enter site, give you the perimeter or the size of the area. Thereafter, the plan surveyor produces will be handed over to a town planner, who will design what he/she wants to design. When town planner is done with his/her design, surveyor still go back to the site. So, in any meaningful development, there so much that surveyor does. Without surveyors, you can’t even talk about urban planning.

Host: Is that why surveyors are called the bedrock of any development?

Guest: Yes.

Sponsor: I agree with our guest on that. Let’s look critically at your profession ma, lot of surveyors are out there, you and I can differential between technician or quack surveyors but not layperson. What is your Institute doing about quack surveyors?

GUEST: When we say technicians, they are part of the team of surveyors, then quacks are the group of people who do not have any training and they are not so recognized in the profession. All professions have quacks, even in the medical field and also in the law profession we have quacks, so in surveying we also have quacks and the Nigerian Institution of Surveyors on their own have the ethics that guides their practice and they as much as possible discourage people from patronizing a quack.

HOST: So how do you totally eradicate them because we still have them in the society, still doing things that they’re not supposed to do, still giving professionals difficult job to do or probably giving them bad names in the society or how do you intend to totally eradicate them?

GUEST: I will tell you there is no profession that can totally eradicate quackery, but Nigerian institution of Surveyors as a body will go through sensitizing people through publicity, even people that are learned, that are professional are patronizing quacks. Apart from this, when we talk about land we talk about people that are in the remote area, people that are closer to them are not educated. They are the quacks, they are very close to the grassroots. When you see them they will sit under the tree to drink palm wine with the chiefs in the village, so the Nigerian Institution of surveyors are trying their best even through programs like this on other media to educate our people. We cannot rule it out, our surveyors also they encourage and indulge these quacks, so we encourage and guide our members to as much as possible help in eradicating quackery. When a quack give you a survey plan without going back to the site and you sign it. We pray we will not sign on our death warrant {AMEN}. The signature of a surveyor, even when he/she is dead matters and you are the one that will be called upon to carry out any correction that is discovered on the job. When you go to court nobody knows a quack even the technicians, it is the surveyor that carries that liability for life. So, we encourage our members to play by the rules.

One of them that are found wanting, we have ways of dealing with them. That is why people that have issues will come and complain that they have issues when they mention the name of the person, we will tell them that this is not our member. So, we will encourage the public to try and give out their survey to known people and the only known people by the law of Nigeria are the registered Surveyors.

Host: WOW! That was a great one there, those were words from the present NIS chairman of Ondo State, Mrs. Helen Fakorede. There is a question here for you which says ‘Most licensed surveyors don’t visit site before signing survey plan for their technician and this should worry your institute what are the penalties, what are the measures that are put in place to put smiles on the face of the customer that are patronizing surveyors?

Guest: It is not right for a surveyor to sign any survey plan that you did not visit the site and as I said earlier surveying is a teamwork. I’m a registered surveyor and also a practicing surveyors and I have people that are working with me, I have graduates that are trained in that course, who have ND, HND and so on in my office. I don’t have to be in all the sites to work but when these people go they should be competent enough that was why I said technicians are different from quacks, a quack is not trained and by the categorization of the surveyors in Nigerian category. We have registered surveyors, pupil surveyors – who are graduates that are about to be registered, we have technologist who is an HND holder, we have technicians who is an ND holder which is the lowest and we have students who are still studying those courses, so these people have enough knowledge to go to site and work, but when you have quacks as the case may be and they brought job to you, it is your duty as a surveyor to go to that site you cannot rely on whatever they have done because they are not trained – most of them learn surveying like the way a mechanic learns his job which is not acceptable. So, to us in the Nigerian institution of surveyors we have a way of dealing with ourselves, we have ethics committee. I will like to tell the public that if you have issues write to the Nigerian institute of Surveyors, no surveyor will want to lose his/her license because of all these things.

HOCOS forum, the system put together by the state government to accelerate the Certificate of Occupancy for the people in Ondo state, through this we also discovered some surveys that have errors. Nobody is perfect as a registered surveyor you can carry out a survey that can came out as an error but the fact is that he/she should be ready to go back to the site since it carries your signature. The gravity of an unethical practice is a high one.

Sponsor: Another question we have here is more about the way people relate with quacks. There are somethings that surveyors do that seems like black market, some people call it red copy or record copy. What is more appropriate here – red copy or record copy?

Guest: It is record copy because it is the record you submit to the Surveyor General of the state for record keeping. It is not the document you give to your client but it is your mandatory duty as a surveyor that after carrying out a survey within 30 days you must submit it to the office of Surveyor General. The law states that within 30 days that it must be submitted.

Sponsor: One more question what is the average cost for a plot of land and the cost when doing a change of title?

Guest: we have the prime and non-prime area. In Non-prime, a plot is less than 1000sqm hence it is 80,000 thousand naira per plot and it is the lowest in the southwest as at now. And in prime areas it is 100,000 thousand naira per plot. Change of title charges depend. We charge in percentage. It may be percentage of the land cost and/or current  survey plan rate.

Radio interview of Chairman, Nigeria Institution of Surveyors Ondo State Branch.