Zero Incidents: The Safety Record Nigerian Construction Can’t Explain Away

By Segun Abe

Across eighteen months of federal bridge and highway construction, concrete pours at elevation, heavy equipment operation, thousands of worker-hours, Adedoyin Oje’s teams recorded zero lost-time incidents. The HSE compliance rate isn’t just above Nigerian norms. It exceeds what most European contractors achieve. On federal infrastructure. With local crews. Under typical budget constraints.

“When auditors first reviewed the data, they thought it was underreported,” recalled a safety official. “Perfect safety records don’t happen on Nigerian federal projects. Except apparently they do, if you change how safety actually works.” The framework treats safety as an engineering parameter, not compliance exercise: daily quantitative hazard mapping, structured soil-structure interface reviews during planning to reduce risk exposure during execution, pre-pour inspection protocols with automatic work stoppage if criteria aren’t met.

“The first time she actually stopped a concrete pour for a PPE violation, people were shocked,” said a foreman. “We were under schedule pressure. Stopping work seemed insane. But she was serious. Work stopped until compliance hit 95%. After that, everyone understood.” The accountability structure was equally uncompromising, every crew’s safety metrics displayed publicly, daily compliance rates posted where all teams could see them, near-miss tracking triggering process reviews.

“It created competition,” explained a worker. “Your crew’s safety record was visible to everyone. Nobody wanted the worst numbers. Social pressure drove performance in ways management directives never achieved.” What makes this significant is that the same projects achieving perfect safety records also finished 27% faster than comparable work. Safety and performance weren’t competing priorities, they were integrated outcomes of better process discipline.

The Federal Ministry of Works incorporated elements of her HSE framework into updated procurement guidelines. When a project manager’s safety protocols become national standard, the recognition is extraordinary. “Her results eliminate the usual excuses for poor safety performance,” noted a ministry official. “Insufficient resources, regulatory limitations, cultural factors, she achieved international HSE standards despite all those constraints. The question becomes: why can’t everyone else?”

The structured soil-structure interface reviews represent particular innovation. By analyzing load sequencing during design to identify hazards before construction begins, the approach reduces risk fundamentally rather than just managing it during execution. “Most engineers think about constructability,” noted a structural specialist. “She thought about constructability and safety together. She’d redesign construction sequences if they created unnecessary risk.”

For Nigerian construction, where hundreds of workers die annually in preventable accidents, the demonstration that perfect safety is achievable has uncomfortable implications. If one project manager can do it, why can’t others? The data is audited, verified, impossible to dismiss, which means poor safety performance becomes harder to justify as inevitable.