Ikoyi building collapse: One incident too many

The collapse of the 21-storey building in Ikoyi is one incident too many in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial nerve center where the inter-play of the good, the bad, and the ugly belies its claim of being a mega and smart city with a loft dream of becoming a 21st Century economy.

Though the 21-Storey building is the first of its kind, being the tallest still under construction, to collapse, it is not an isolated case. Lagos has seen several cases of building collapse in the last two decades when it assumed an embarrassing dimension.

The Lagos State branch of the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV) notes that between 2011 and 2019, there were 88 building collapse incidents in Nigeria and only 21 of this number happened outside Lagos.

This only lends credence to findings by researchers at the Department of Engineering Sciences in Kwara State University, Ilorin that South West region of Nigeria recorded the highest number of building collapse incidents in the country between 2009 and 2019.

Trying to correct all the problems that exist in the building industry will be difficult, but going forward, new buildings and new town planning should be done professionally by licensed engineers, planners, and architects working together

The use of South West, in our view, may be just a matter of nomenclature or convenience. Lagos is the right word to use because we are convinced that, if the researchers were to disclose an analysis of the distribution of the incident, it would not have been surprising if Lagos alone accounted for 90 percent.

The question that readily comes to mind is ‘why Lagos?’ And answers come falling over one another; they are not far-fetched. Unarguably, Lagos is a megacity by sheer number. But, in terms of landmass, it is the smallest, yet the largest by virtue of its population which is estimated at 20 million.

This mismatch in landmass and population is constantly creating economic, social, and environmental problems that morph easily into housing deficit and over-crowding such that, at any given time, people are in desperate need of housing as both public and private sector efforts at increasing supply are grossly inadequate to meet the surging demand.

What this has led to, unfortunately, is a situation where anything goes. It has also created an amorphous situation where everybody and anybody is a real estate investor and a house builder. And with the state and its regulatory agencies looking the other way when the thief is in the house, what we have on our hands are desperadoes who venture into property development.

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We are not unaware of other major factors that contribute to building collapse in Nigeria as a whole, such as the use of non-professionals in the building industry; corruption, which drives cutting corners, and the use of substandard construction materials.

But Lagos as a city and a government has been so lax in minding what happens in its housing sector. It does seem to us that the regulatory authorities in the state are accessories to the unwholesome activities in the sector that threw up the likes of a 21-storey house with questionable professional supervision.

It is instructive that the state governor, Babatunde Sanwo-Olu, admitted that “we all have made mistakes.” That is self-indictment, which, we feel, is very courageous and welcome. The suspension of the general manager of the state’s building control agency, Gbolahan Oki, is another courageous act by the governor and we commend him for that too.

However, there is so much more that the state and the federal government can do to end the frequent loss of both human and material resources to building collapse. The five-man panel set up by the state government on the collapsed Ikoyi building is an acid test for the governor.

Time has come for the state to prove wrong, popular views that building collapse problem rests with the government as its planning authorities seem to be so much in a hurry that they don’t go further than the approval of the building plan.

We agree with a former president of the Association of Consulting Engineers of Nigeria (ACEN) who says that “our problem in Nigeria is that everybody believes he or she can build and nobody stops them. Many Lagos residents live in coffins. The government needs to wake up and make a scapegoat of somebody so that other people will be more careful.”

We are yet to see any government enforcing the National Building Code, which seeks to ensure the safety, efficiency, and quality of buildings and structures in the country. The code also sets out minimum standards to be met in pre-construction such as design; construction and post-construction stages of buildings. The time is now to enforce all of that.

In the opinion of the International Federation of Consulting Engineers (FIDIC), “trying to correct all the problems that exist in the building industry will be difficult, but going forward, new buildings and new town planning should be done professionally by licensed engineers, planners, and architects working together.” We cannot agree more.

It is our belief that buildings collapse because people want to cut corners and, most times, the person who checks the building of these houses is an unqualified professional, and the man who engages such a person does so because they do not want to pay the right fee to a professional who will do the right job.