Four contracts, one campus: fourteen years at Whitesands School
A client who comes back once is satisfied. A client who comes back four times is telling you something a testimonial cannot.
Between 2012 and 2018, Ikota Educational Foundation placed four separate contracts with Donkem at Whitesands School in Lekki. Not one contract with four phases — four contracts, each tendered, each awarded, each finished before the next began.
What the four covered
The first was Phase IV of the school building itself. Practical Completion was certified on 17 September 2012 by Laborda Associates, the supervising architects. Then the sports facilities: a tennis court and a football field. Then the external works — the parking area and the driveways across the campus. Then, in 2018, the kitchen extension, certified on 21 September that year by Redgrey Associates.
Two of the four carry independent Practical Completion certificates, issued by the supervising professionals rather than written by us. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Any contractor can tell you a job went well. A certificate is somebody else, with their own name and their own liability, saying so.
Why a school is harder than it looks
A school does not stop. Children arrive at seven and leave at three, five days a week, and the building programme has to work around that rather than the other way round. Deliveries land outside teaching hours. Noisy work goes into holidays. Hoarding is not decoration; it is the line between a construction site and a playground.
Every one of the four contracts was delivered with the school in session. That is the reason there were four.
What it says about the way we work
Repeat work is the only measure of a contractor that cannot be manufactured. Anyone can win a first contract with a low number. The second one has to be earned on the first one's performance, and the fourth on the third's.