Nigerian female engineer, Makut redefining safety, reliability and sustainable infrastructure

By Rita Okoye

Long before a building fails, the warning signs are often already on record. A generator that trips too often, a pump that runs hotter each month, a chiller that burns more power every year: in many Nigerian buildings, these signals go unread until something breaks. A framework co-authored by Nigerian engineer Susan Ochi Makut argues that the digital models used to design buildings could become an early warning system, flagging those failures before they happen.

The stakes are high. On July 12, 2024, the two-storey Saints Academy school in Busa Buji, Jos, Plateau State, collapsed during morning classes, killing 22 students. In a July 2024 report, the Building Collapse Prevention Guild recorded at least 135 collapses nationwide between 2022 and 2024. Authorities often blame such disasters on weak enforcement of building rules and poor maintenance.

Running buildings has also become far more expensive. In April 2024, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission raised the Band A tariff from N66 to N225 per kilowatt-hour. Distribution companies set it at N209.5 from July 2024.

Ms. Makut explored the challenge alongside US-based researchers Adedoyin Oluwatoyin Olutimehin and Adeshola Oladunni Bankole of Kennesaw State University’s Department of Construction Management. Their study, “Integrating Building Information Modeling and Lifecycle Reliability Assessment for Sustainable Building Infrastructure: A Conceptual Framework,” published in the International Journal of Technology, Management and Humanities, examines how digital building models and long-term reliability assessments might help engineers improve infrastructure performance, reduce maintenance risks and support more sustainable construction practices.

Building Information Modeling, or BIM, replaces paper drawings with a detailed digital model of a structure and its parts. According to the authors, such models are produced in large numbers during design and construction, but their data is rarely used to track how mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems fail, how often they need servicing or how much energy they waste as they age.

“We spend a great deal of money building detailed digital models, and then we put them on a shelf the day the building is handed over. The information needed to predict when a pump or a generator will fail is often already there. We are simply not using it,” Ms. Makut said.

After reviewing 58 published sources, the team found that facility managers tend to treat equipment data as a stock list, while reliability engineers treat failure data as a statistics problem. Their framework links five layers, covering design, information, reliability, energy and decision-making, and builds standard calculations for failure probability, equipment availability, risk ranking and whole-life cost into the building model itself.

Applied to a simulated mid-rise office building, the framework produced two practical findings. The components ranked as most risky changed depending on how many years ahead managers planned. And backup equipment paid off only when the cost of an outage passed a level that could be calculated. A hospital that cannot afford an hour without power, for example, can justify a second system; a small office may not.

Ms. Makut said the approach borrows directly from the oil and gas industry. “In oil and gas, nobody waits for a compressor to fail before planning its maintenance. Our buildings deserve the same discipline, especially now that every wasted kilowatt-hour costs Nigerians so much more,” she said.

Ms. Makut, now based in the United States, built her career in facilities engineering at Chevron. According to her professional profile, she led the non-intrusive calibration of six crude storage tanks at Escravos, Delta State, which restored regulatory compliance and avoided penalties of more than US$7 million without a safety incident or lost production. She also delivered the upgrade of the 400,000-barrel Escravos crude Tank 8 a quarter ahead of schedule.

She also mentors interns and young engineers, and sees that work as part of widening a field where women remain a minority. “Young Nigerian women should not see engineering as a field they need permission to enter. The industry needs their skills, and the best way to prove it is to bring more of them through the door,” Ms. Makut said.

As Nigeria counts the cost of failing buildings in lives and in naira, her message is simple: much of the data needed to prevent the next breakdown may already exist. The challenge is putting it to work.