By Ebele Orakpo
The era of collapsed buildings with the at-tendant human and material casualties seems to be coming to an end as Nigeria can now boast of those unique, luxury and very strong homes only seen in movies a few years ago. Haven Homes, the Real Estate subsidiary of Haven Global Resources Ltd., is in the business of not just providing solid structures that will stand the test of time, but also buildings that the occupants can call home.

A home, we have been told, is different from a house because it carries the notion of comfort, security, happiness etc., whereas a house is a structure with no particular emotional aspect to it. In this chat with Mr. Tayo Sonuga, the Managing Director of Haven Homes, he speaks on why he established the outfit, the difficulties in doing business in Nigeria and the way forward. Excerpts:

On completion of his one year compulsory service to fatherland in 1989, Mr. Sonuga left Nigeria to seek greener pastures in the United Kingdom. The accountancy graduate from the Federal Polytechnic Ilaro, Ogun State, said: “While in the UK, I got into property investment. I was buying and letting properties until I decided to come back to Nigeria in 2005. At that time, property business was still booming.”

It is said that when opportunity meets preparedness, success is the result. Mr. Sonuga saw the great opportunity in property business in Nigeria and he was prepared.  “I saw an opportunity to develop quality real estate for Nigeria. I teamed up with a firm of architects who also have the passion to build quality and unique real estate.

just had it in mind to do something really different, something that will stand out and something that will also be very practical in our environment. By practical, I mean the fact that we live in an environment where there is so much sunlight.

For some people in the UK, their life’s dream is to holiday or even leave the UK and go and live in sunny places like Spain and Italy. And here in Nigeria, we have sunlight in abundance so I said: ‘Hey, what is the point in building houses and still have them all closed up?’

*Mr. Tayo Sonuga...We must revisit our educational system and revive our technical colleges if our nation must move forward.

So our architects came up with this unique concept of building really large windows to allow a lot of light into the house and to the glory of God, it has been a success ever since. Any Haven Home you walk into, you can instantly tell because there is so much light, no dark spots.”

Describing the uniqueness of Haven Homes, Mr. Sonuga said the key features include the atriums strategically placed inside each home to import daylight from the rooftop to all interior spaces and circulate air in the process.

“The atriums transform your home to a place where sun, plants and other elements of nature join as one to form a unique tropical haven. The atriums are also ‘lanterns’ in the night with our lighting design that forms a string of illumination running through the entire house,” he said.

On the challenges faced by the firm, Sonuga noted that “like anything new in this part of the world, it takes a lot of courage but we decided it looks good, it looks beautiful so we went into it. We had challenges, number one challenge being the availability of enough skilled workmen in Nigeria.

Everybody wants to do short cut business, it’s like the art and discipline of going to learn a trade and seeing it through, (it could take years but you come out as a master), is almost lost in our society. We will like to build many more of these houses but sometimes we are faced with the challenge of having enough people to build.

And even the few we have, we have to constantly supervise the building; we have to constantly go back to check if they are doing it right,” he noted.

Continuing, Sonuga said: “We still retain a number of the workmen that started with us. They have been trained in the art of being detailed so they are still working with us but there is only so much a workman can do especially when you are talking about engaging in bigger projects.

So we are considering bringing in workers from neighbouring countries like Ghana and Togo which is a shame really. But workers from these countries are more detailed. They went through the process of learning the skill.

“The challenge we have with our people is that may be they were working for somebody and within a few months, they feel they have known it all, but they do not know the technical details behind what is being done. So when they get to a place like ours where nothing is conventional, like our windows now, may be he was used to doing the average 4×4 and then he comes to us and he is told that this window is 10×8, the guy is lost.”

The Haven Homes boss stated that most of the raw materials like sand, granite, iron rods etc., are sourced locally while some of the materials used for the finishing are imported.

On the way forward, Mr. Sonuga said: “I think the government can help but we, as a people, need to reorient ourselves, we need to come out of the mentality of making wealth overnight. Wealth is created; it is built overtime which takes training, discipline, applying yourself to the right principles and over a period of time, if you do that consistently, you will create wealth.

But in our society today, everybody wants to make it overnight. I think we need to change that culture. On the government side, I believe the government needs to go back to the basics of education. In the UK, government recognises that it is not everybody that will go to the university.

The average white man will tell you that the fact that they don’t go to the university does not mean that they cannot be successful and I’m telling you I went to a polytechnic but that was when Nigeria was still Nigeria, when we used to have technical training colleges where somebody might decide he does not want to be so theoretical to go to the university but wants to learn a trade in a technical school.

It could be in electrical, plumbing or welding. So if the government can go back to that, it will solve that challenge.”

Asked if they build and then sell, Sonuga said: “General business is called buying and selling but we turned it round, we sell and buy. All our projects are sold upfront. We sell first before building. A lot of people already know that we deliver good quality products and on time. That is why instead of build and sell, we sell and build,” he said.