The collapsed Ikoyi building

AGAIN, but this time with much more humongous losses, the country has witnessed the collapse of a building. Nigerians woke up to the month of November with the news of the collapse of a 21-storey building at the Ikoyi area of Lagos State. As of the last count, 43 corpses had been pulled out of the wreckage, including its owner, Femi Osibona, an international property developer. There were 15 survivors.

The collapse has naturally elicited many reactions, both from the government and the people. Most of the reactions point to structural and governmental flaws as the Achilles heel of the project. Chief among the questions being asked is how building collapse has become a recurrent, perennial calamity in the land. Following his visit to the ruins of what was once a high-rise building said to be the first of its kind in terrace constructions in Lagos, the Lagos State governor, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, inaugurated a six-member panel of inquiry with the aim of investigating the cause of the collapse at the headquarters of the Lagos State Waterways Authority (LASWA) at Falomo, venue of the panel’s sitting. Among others, the panel, chaired by Toyin Ayinde, president of the National Institute of Town Planners (NITP), was empowered with the mandate of unraveling the circumstances surrounding the tragedy, so that culprits could be brought to justice and a recurrence of such incidents averted.

Without prejudice to the invitations that would be extended to other parties, the structural engineering consultant to the property development company that owned the collapsed building and two others in the neighbourhood should be the first to receive the panel’s invitation. Almost immediately after the disaster, a letter purportedly written by a company by the name Prowess Engineering Limited went viral on social media. In the letter, the company allegedly withdrew its structural consultancy services from Fourscore Heights Ltd, Osibona’s company, because it could “no longer share the same vision” with Osibona  “as our client in terms of how the project is being executed.” Apart from guaranteeing the integrity of the earlier two buildings built by the same Fourscore and supervised by it, Prowess said that it could only guarantee the integrity of works done on the collapsed building up to its fourth floor, “provided specifications have been met in terms of concrete strength.”

Although the integrity of this piece of correspondence has been questioned, there is a need to establish whether or not any consultants withdrew from the project at some point, and why. Such consultants would need to avail the panel of the structural infractions the building suffered that made them to pull out of the project. More fundamentally, the panel would be able to demand why such consultants did not notify the building authorities in Lagos of the suspected anomalies. In any case, it is on record that officials of the Lagos State Building Control Agency (LASBCA) once sealed off the building in question and caused the police to take in Osibona. But he was allegedly released the same day and the building unsealed.

Another very germane riddle that the panel has to unravel is the issue of the approved height that Fourscore was given on the ill-fated building. There has been controversy on whether it was 15 or 21-storey building that the company was granted approval to build, and the altercations over this indeed became messy when variances sprouted up between the accounts given by the Lagos State deputy governor, Mr. Obafemi Hamzat, and Gbolahan Oki, General Manager of LASBCA. While the latter told the press that the approval granted the developer of the collapsed building was for 15 stories, Oki, who was immediately suspended by the state government, claimed that the building had approval for 21 stories. Oki also confirmed that the state government attempted to seal off the building. He said: “It was sealed off in June. It was sealed because the agency came in to do a structural test. They saw some abnormalities, so they shut it down for those things to be corrected. They were making corrective actions when this (collapse) happened.” The contradictions stoked the belief that Fourscore, just like many Nigerian entrepreneurs, had circumvented due process and unilaterally jacked up the number of floors, spurning professional requirements.

Without preempting the panel’s inquiry, it seems sufficiently clear that there were structural weaknesses in the building and that due process was bypassed. In relation to the collapsed building, the question of compromised quality explains why such a monumental investment had to come to ruin and why innocent lives were lost. Whatever is not correct, especially at a structural level, remains incorrect regardless of efforts to paper over the cracks. It is obvious that the building would not have collapsed if the right materials had been used in the right quantities and if the bowel of the earth that shouldered it had been reinforced with enough structural strength to carry the humongous load that it eventually carried.

If the Lagos State government must know, there is very little public confidence in the inquiry into the collapsed building. Nigerians believe that the tragedy resulted from the pernicious influence of the country’s political elite. The onus is on the government and the panel to do a thorough job and achieve the mandate of “unraveling the circumstances surrounding the collapsed building so that culprits could be brought to justice.” It is only by doing this that Nigeria can avert a recurrence of this calamity.

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