Analysis of maintenance culture employed in public infrastructure in Nigeria.

Year after year, governments across the globe make budgetary plans for public expenditures, income, debt, and financial allocations to the local, state and federal government. The good news is, these financial allocations are utilized duly. But the bad news is, despite the huge amount spent on these infrastructures, there are reported cases of poor maintenance culture or lack of it.

The main objective of this public administration project topic is to do an analysis of the maintenance culture and why the research outcome is so. Moving forward, let us consider what some of these public infrastructure are and possible factors that can influence their maintenance.

As the spotlight revealed earlier, we have several cases in Nigeria at the local, state and federal levels, where government based projects have been left uncompleted and in some cases completed but seem left without maintenance. They range from buildings, schools, roads, railways, refineries, water system, drainage system, electricity transmission channel, post offices, government owned telephone line and what have you.

While this public administration project topic analyses the maintenance culture on public infrastructure, let us quickly consider factors that influence the maintenance culture.

Financing

When there is minimal budget for public infrastructure maintenance, or lack of it, chances are that the maintenance culture will suffer.

Change of government tenure

Poor continuity culture among public officials also influences maintenance culture of public infrastructure. For example, if a previous government builds a water system for Kaduna residents for example, the subsequent government is expected to maintain that project. Just as we see in some cases, a new government goes ahead to start a fresh one when the old one has not received enough attention in terms of maintenance.

Other factors include;

Corruption, poor supervision, political interest, poor attitude towards maintenance or lack of it, poor continuity policy, cost of maintenance and lots more.

This is a very interesting project topic to explore, see second paragraph to access the full project.