• Thursday, March 28, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

Building collapse: Time for Lagos to knock down the city to save it

Lagos building collapse-2

The collapse of three-storey building that happened at Ita-Faji area of Lagos Island a couple of days ago was one building collapse too many in Nigeria’s most thriving commercial city that suffers both quantitative and qualitative infrastructure deficit as well as dire housing situation.

Due largely to its small land mass and large population size estimated at 3,577 square kilometers which is about 0.4 percent of total land area of  Nigeria’s 923,768 square kilometers, and 20 million respectively, Lagos is challenged on all fronts.

Of all these challenges, housing is a major issue in the state, given its estimated 3million deficit which explains why many of the residents live in sub-human squatter settlements not only in the identified slum areas of the city, but also in some parts of the city centre such as Lagos Island.

Like most African cities, the large size of Lagos, population-wise, which is supposed to be an asset seems to be a liability and the city planners and managers seem not to help matters in terms of physical expansion and planning control and regulatory enforcement, making the city both chaotic and unlivable.

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) published in its 2018 Global Liveability Index, ranked Lagos as the third worst city to live in the world.  Out of 140 world cities, EIU ranked Lagos 137th, citing poor living conditions, ease of doing business, security, infrastructure, transportation, economic stability, etc.

Expectation after this ranking was that the managers of the city that prides itself as a mega city by sheer numbers, a smart city by just wishing to be, and a resilient city by simple selection, would have worked on improving on its lot. But they did not, or planned actions are taking too long to materialize, hence existing infrastructure continue to get worse while housing continues to an unaffordable luxury.

Like Nairobi, the administrative and commercial capital of Kenya, time is now for Lagos planners to knock down the city to save it. The Economists of London reported recently that municipal authorities in Nairobi spent much of last year knocking things down.

“Shopping malls, petrol stations and apartment blocks were levelled; bulldozers cut through slums, leaving tens of thousands homeless. All this destruction may seem rather wanton in a poor city. Yet the government-backed body overseeing it, the Nairobi regeneration task-force, insists that the only way to save the Kenyan capital is to wreck bits of it”, the paper disclosed.

Lagos is just due for urban regeneration and renewal and that exactly is what municipal authorities have done in Kenya. Besides Lagos Island where the state government revealed there are over 1,000 distressed buildings, over 90 percent of buildings in the identified slum areas of the state including Ajegunle, Ijora Badia, Amukoko, Okokomaiko, etc, are defective and disasters waiting to happen.

The state government revealed further that the collapsed building at Ita-Faji had been marked for demolition about three times, but the building regulatory agency did not demolish it, affirming experts’ view that the high incidence of building collapse in the state is due to political will to enforce the rules and corrupt practices by regulatory authorities.

Lagos has got a large chunk of old, dilapidated, waiting-to-collapse buildings, sometimes in prime locations of the city, yet almost nothing is being done to demolish-and-replace these buildings as a matter of government policy which has raised the status of Nairobi to a world class city.

The benefit of urban regeneration and renewal are immeasurable. The Economist quotes HassConsult, a local real-estate agent, as saying that today, Nairobi is unrecognisable from the sleepy town it was at the turn of the century, adding that, in the past 12 years, land prices have soared more than sixfold in 24 of the city’s 32 suburbs and satellite towns.

According to the estate agent, far more money could be made in Kenyan bricks and mortar than in rich-world stock markets which is why investors don’t bother investing in the Nasdaq (returns of 210 percent since 2007) because an acre of land in Juja, one of Nairobi’s satellite towns, would have fetched them 1,428 percent returns on their investments.

In the case of Lagos, a deliberation government policy on urban renewal and regeneration in terms of pulling old and decaying structures down and replacing same, as was attempted by former governor, Babatunde Fashola at Ijora Badia and Lagos Island, would yield a lot of benefits.

Apart from environmental beautification befitting a mega city that Lagos aspires to be, such an effort would also solve major social problems of homelessness and destitution as well as prevent the frequent and unfortunate incidents of building failures that have cause the state enormous resources, leaving families in endless lamentations for lost lives and properties.

While residents await the state authorities to initiate processes and programmes that will lead to urban renewal, the authorities have to take far-reaching measures to prevent further incidents of building collapse in the state, especially avoidable ones like the Ita-Faji incident,

This has become necessary because, though influx of substandard building materials into the market, non-implementation of the National Building Code, employment of cheap and unqualified labour, use unqualified building contractors, lack of adequate supervision by the designer(architect) and engineer, etc, are often cited as causes of building failures, the government and building professionals bear more blame for their neglect.

“Many of the buildings on Lagos Island, Isale Eko particularly, have deteriorated so significantly that renovation should not be encouraged”, noted Kunle Awobudu, president, Building Collapse Prevention Guild (BCPG), who was at the scene of the Ita-Faji building collapse.

Awobodu stressed that it was not acceptable that  buildings in that area had been mark for demolition, saying, “this particular one was one out of many that were not properly constructed. The issue of marking is immaterial. There are over 1,000 houses that were served on the Lagos Island and many of them are still standing.”

According to him, it was a political statement to say the buildings had been marked. “Marking a building might barely mean to present documents of building plans or building approval. Once you present those, they can permit you to continue your work. It is only when they seal towards demolition and verify for integrity that we can say an action has been taken. The matter is beyond marking,” he said.

The Ita-Faaji building collapse is the third to have hapened on the Lagos Island area in almost a year, and sixth collapse incidents in the state generally since February 2018. News of collapse has been heard in Alagbado and Ikeja and appears to be imminent in other areas except preventive measures are adopted.

Samuel Offiong Ukpong, former chairman, Nigerian Institute of Estate Surveyors and Valuers, Lagos chapter, says building collapse will stop when experts are involved in building construction. “If our members who are experts were involved, I am not sure this would have happened. Look at the sky liners at Marina, people who were project managers and estate surveyors and valuers worked and most of the buildings are still standing,” he noted

Ukpong, however linked the failure to consult expert service in construction to poor condition of the economy and the profit-oriented nature of deals offered to indigent land owners by developers.

He believes the monitoring of construction activities should be a joint effort between government officials and independent professionals to ensure effective checks. “Developers look at the turnaround time of their investment and might do a shoddy job because the interest is not human beings but how much they can make in a particular location. As a member of the BCPG, we have been asking government to partner with us but all our efforts are not honoured,” Ukpong told BusinessDay.

Olayinka Omotosho, immediate past chairman of Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, believes that estate surveyors and valuers have a huge role to play in preventing building collapse. “The successful completion of any building depends on a lot of key factors, few of which are as important as the relationship of all professionals involved in the process”, he said.

Omotosho  noted further that, in most cases, the estate surveyor acts as a consultant to the client (property owner), meaning that he/she act as an intermediary between other professionals on behalf of the  client until the final two stages in construction which are the disposition and maintenance stage.

“Since the activities in terminal stages of a building project is a role the estate surveyor occupies, his effectiveness in this role will be dependent on the quality of work done in the preceding stages”, he said, adding that it becomes important that he is well grounded in those stages to enforce a quality that will be required in attaining the client’s end goal.

CHUKA UROKO