Ibadan

Manager at an Ibadan contractor

From April 2009 to April 2012, Alberto Micheletti’s profile lists him as a manager at L. D’Alberto & Company Limited in Ibadan. The firm’s own site describes an indigenous Nigerian company, based in Ibadan, established in 1956, working in building and civil engineering. Its profile also gives a registration number and a street address. Those details identify that firm. They are deliberately not repeated as contact details on this website, because readers paste footers into directories. Micheletti Construction does not occupy L. D’Alberto’s office.

The role was management, inside a contractor that had already been building in the city for decades, including work the firm itself associates with the University of Ibadan. We do not adopt that project list. What we do take from the chapter is familiarity with Ibadan as a place where buildings are repaired, extended, and reroofed inside an older urban fabric, not only poured as new estates on a clear plot.

A quantity surveyor, Angela Olubunmi Ogunnubi, lists her own earlier employment at L. D’Alberto from January 2011 to January 2013, overlapping the end of Alberto’s time there, and lists Micheletti Construction Limited from September 2013. That is a public career trace. It is not a story about a particular contract.

Hills, an August lull, and a long wet season

Ibadan is not flat, and it is not the coast. The city spreads over hills and ridges. Mapo sits on a hill; the University of Ibadan occupies a large northern campus; Eleyele has its lake to the northwest. A 2024 study of rainfall and flooding in Ibadan and Ikeja describes Ibadan’s climate as tropical wet and dry: a wet season from March through October, a lull in August that nearly splits the rains in two, and peaks around June and September. The authors give a mean annual rainfall of about 1,420 millimetres, falling on roughly 109 days, with mean relative humidity around 75 percent. November to February is the dry season, and with it the West African harmattan. The same paper treats flooding as a real consequence of how that rain falls, not as a Lagos-only problem.

NiMet’s 2026 seasonal outlook, in the DAWN Commission’s southwest summary, expects a longer-than-normal rainy season in parts of Oyo as well as Lagos, and it gives Ibadan a late July start for the little dry season in that year’s table. Forecasts move. The durable point for a roof is the shape of the year: a first peak, a tempting pause, a second peak. Opening a roof in the August lull because “the rain has finished” is how an Ibadan ceiling gets a new stain in September.

Harmattan here is real but not the Abuja version. Dust arrives, mornings cool, and then the humidity returns earlier than it does in the FCT. A coating specified only for dry harmattan dust can still sit in damp air for most of the year. Older aluminium sheets that have already chalked do not become new because the sky cleared in January.

Neighbourhoods with different ages of building

Jericho and Iyaganku are the established GRAs: quieter plots, older trees, houses that range from large bungalows on generous land to newer duplexes fitted in beside them. Iyaganku sits south of Dugbe and is often described as one of the calm central reservations. Jericho has the same prestige and a road link people use toward Dugbe and Ring Road. Work in these streets is usually on occupied houses with neighbours who will notice a stripped roof.

Bodija is the other name everyone uses, and it is two places. Old Bodija was planned with a grid and large plots and sits near the University of Ibadan and the secretariat. New Bodija is busier and more commercial. A reroof in Old Bodija and a shop-house repair off the Bodija market road should not be written up as the same job. Akobo, in Lagelu to the east, is a later residential area along the Idi-Ape–Basorun–Akobo corridor, with a mix of older bungalows and newer flats, and with internal roads that are worth seeing in the rain before anyone promises a delivery time.

Challenge and Ring Road are movement corridors as much as neighbourhoods. The Ring Road–Challenge route is one of the dual carriageways that structure the city. Commercial frontages, flats, and older houses sit on those roads and take both traffic dust and the full force of a driving rain. Oluyole is the industrial and estate name to the south, where warehouses and factory roofs introduce spans and drainage that a Bodija bungalow does not. Around the University of Ibadan, Agbowo, and Samonda, the housing is shaped by students and staff: denser, often older, often patched. Mokola, Dugbe, Agodi, and Eleyele each add their own grain — a hill roundabout, a commercial core, gardens, a lakeside road — and none of them is a reason to claim we have a current site board standing there.

Aged sheets and the habit of the patch

The failure we expect to discuss in Ibadan, more than salt spray, is age. Corrugated and long-span sheets that have been nailed, silicone-lined, and over-sheeted until the roof is a diary of wet seasons. A patch can be the right answer when the rest of the covering is sound and the deck under it is dry. It is the wrong answer when the battens have sagged and every ridge has already been “done” by someone else. Trees over older compound houses drop leaves into gutters and hold damp against the sheet. On sloping streets, water that leaves one roof can arrive at the next house as surface flow. That is a ground problem and a roof problem at once, which is why building and roofing sit on the same form.

An extension in a family compound — a room to the side, a floor on a bungalow — has to meet the old roof honestly. The new valley or the new apron is where Ibadan jobs leak, not in the middle of a fresh sheet. We look at the junction before we talk about a price. Approvals and fees, where a local authority requires them, are not quoted on this page. They depend on the plot and the year, and a made-up figure would be worse than silence.

On the form, name the area the way Ibadan uses it, and say whether the house is occupied through the work. If the roof has already been patched, say so. That single fact changes the advice more than a generic paragraph about “southwest Nigeria” ever could.

Read Lagos and Abuja for the other two chapters, or start with roof repairs and renovations.