Theft at home construction sites are major causes of headache to both building contractors and home owners. Some workers have been jailed while others have been wrongly accused. Thieves target these sites and make off with valuable building materials. Building sites in developing areas like ikorodu are as affected as sites in developed areas like Yaba. Site workers and greedy site managers also connive to further enrich themselves at the expense of the client’s funds.

Here are some tips:

1. Make Good Security Provision For Site Storage

You can build a suitable site house with some plywood ( or few dozens of 1x12 plank), 2x3 wood, and a bundle of iron sheets. A good carpenter can finish one in a day. You may consider giving the site guard, contractor and site supervisor joint responsibility for the safety of the materials.

2. Build a fence

At the early stage of your project, having a fence and accompanying gates would deter thieves. If you can afford it, build your fence first or you could just have used iron sheets to surround your site and have a gate with locks. This would make it hard for thieves who live near the construction site to make off with plywood, planks, cement, tools and other valuables.

3. Employ security guards

Nothing beats an onsite patrol. While many Nigerian home owners consider it an excess expense or just give tips to some ‘Aboki’ guards or vigilante’s in the neighbourhood, it is clear that these informal arrangement will not make such guards fully accountable in case of any case of theft.

4. Observe site workers

During construction you will have as many people on your site as possible, especially during days for casting concrete. You can’t verify the attitude of all the workers who work on your project. A simple way to go is to assess and identify the few workers you started with and have been of good character, and ask them to recommend additional workers when you need more hands. Because our friends are much like us, whoever they recommend would be of similar character. A bricklayer supervisor with criminal tendencies would have criminals as laborers.

5. Coordinate Deliveries Of Materials And Appliances

Ensure these items arrive close to the time they will be used or installed. Be there at the delivery or have some trusted person to represent you because suppliers at times don’t deliver the quantities in full. Materials like reinforcement, cement, wood should be delivered few days before they are needed, and counted immediately.

6. Keep inventory

A small book to keep a record of all materials on site can save you hundreds of thousands of Naira. Not knowing the inventory of your items is a loophole which laborers with criminal mindset explore easily. After all, no one can easily know 10 bags of cement was stolen overnight if the last count was a week ago, and several bags had been used for various works since then.

7. Secure your tools and materials

It sounds simple, but too often we wait until the close of the day to pack tools and materials we are no longer using into the store. The problem with this is that some workers on other sites simply come around and pick it up on the pretext they simply want to borrow it. By the end of the day your measuring tapes, hammers, shovels, diggers, wheel barrows, generators are gone. If you are not using them let them be kept in the store. Materials like reinforcement can be chained with padlocks, and wood planks used for the foundation could be used to build a temporary house pending its reuse for the decking.

8. Shine a light on the problem

Site thieves’ don’t usually come armed and also don’t want the spotlight. Having lights on the site discourages them from gaining easy entrance as they are aware they can be easily seen and maybe held by vigilantes. In the era of jungle justice, no thief wants to be held and given the tire treatment. Most sites close by 7pm, and by 7am someone is most likely on the site. During this 12 hour period site thieves are most active. Make provision for adequate lighting for your site at night if you have valuables you don’t want to lose.

9. Notify The Police of Any Suspicious Attempt to Breach Your Site Security

This may seem like an effective clichéd solution to many Nigerians for some obvious reasons but we should not forget that ‘The Police is Still Our Friend’. Most site thieves live in the vicinity of your site, and they may have a history which is already familiar with the police in that area. You can always invite officers from the police station around your site location in cases of site theft. Once the presence of the police is seen on your site by your seen and unseen robbers, there will surely be some message of security beef up passed across.

good..... thanks

10. Install an alarm system

For much larger projects an alarm system would make a lot of impact, when you consider the financial impact of theft. Very few thieves have much confidence to stick around once the alarm sounds. You know those alarms used nowadays to alert ourselves when NEPA supplies light while we are using generator. Exactly, no one wants that attention.


Please feel free to share your opinions on the above tips shared or add any more tips from your personal experiences on construction sites. Thanks.

this is informative

Nice one OP.

Quite informative. Site theft is really a big issue in Nigerian construction projects.

Nice 1... these are the typo threads we need here... cool 1 OP

............

Very good tips. They say experience is the best teacher..Thanks.

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