SIR: The rising status of Lagos as an emerging megacity and a commercial nerve centre in sub-Saharan Africa has come with a number of challenges. One of these is the safety of buildings.
In 2019, figures obtained from the Building Collapse Prevention Guild, an advocacy group of built environment professionals, indicated that Nigeria, recorded not less than 43 cases of building collapses. Lagos had the highest figure with 17 cases, accounting for about 39.53 per cent of the total number of collapsed buildings.
Anambra State had the second highest number with six collapsed buildings while Plateau and Delta states recorded three each. Oyo, Enugu, Ondo and Osun states recorded two collapsed buildings each in 2019 while Imo, Kwara Abia, Adamawa and Katsina states each had one building collapse incident.
Some of the most notable and devastating disasters in the country include the collapse of the guest house of the Synagogue Church of All Nations in 2014 that killed at least 115 people of which 84 of them were South Africans. It was also noted that the country reported 27 cases of building collapse in 2015 with no fewer than 175 deaths recorded. In 2019, another three-storey building in the Ita-Faaji area in Lagos Island collapsed which resulted in the death of about 20 people including primary school pupils.
Building collapses are common in Lagos and hardly a year passes by without cases and each time it results in the loss of many lives. For instance, it was reported that 115 buildings, mostly residential, collapsed in Lagos between 2005 and 2016 with about 4,000 families left homeless and traumatized. In addition, out of 152 buildings that collapsed in Lagos between 2005 and 2020, 76.6% were residential, 13% commercial and 9.4% institutional and most of them are typically multi-storey buildings.
Read Also: Lagos collapsed building death toll rises to 45
Many of the documented cases of building collapse in Nigeria are due to the use of defective or substandard building materials, lack of requisite technical knowledge, non-adherence to building codes, standards and regulations, lack of maintenance, use of non-professionals and the high level of corruption which has ravaged every sphere of the construction industry including government and private parastatals.
Generally, citizens, building professionals and government must take steps to prevent the problem of building collapse. The responsible government agencies and professional bodies must create awareness of the need to obtain planning permission before building. They must also insist on the need to engage professionals in the construction of buildings.
In the latest Ikoyi incident where the state government claimed that the owner of the building was granted permission to build only 15-storey structure but went ahead and built up to 21, appropriate punishment should be meted out to the professionals involved not leaving out property owners.
- Mukhtar Ya’u Madobi
Kano.
Leave a Reply