Mr Bunmi Ajayi is a man of many parts, having chaired previous building collapse probe panels on two occasions: The Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN)’s Guest House building collapse and the five-storey Lekki Gardens’ building collapse. Ajayi, the former President of the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners (NITP) and that of Association of Professional Bodies of Nigeria (APBN), who has just been selected as one of the members of the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN)’s Fact Findings Committee into the Ikoyi 21-storey building collapse, shares his experiences about the previous probes, fallouts, causes of building collapse and ways to stamp it out in Nigeria in this interview with DAYO AYEYEMI.
What can you say about the collapse of the 21-storey building in Ikoyi, Lagos?
The collapse of infrastructure like housing, bridges and the crash of aeroplanes happens everywhere. It is not only in Nigeria that it’s happening. It is unfortunate that it happened, but it happens. The frequency may be worrisome and the circumstance of why they fell is worrisome.
The building that collapsed was still under construction whereas we have old or existing high-rise buildings such as Cocoa House in Ibadan and Western House in Lagos built by foreign contractors still standing? How can you explain this?
We have a lot of buildings that were built after independence. We have the UBA’s building in Marina, Lagos, First Bank’s building and the Central Bank’s building, among others, that are still standing. It is not because they were built by foreigners, but I can agree with you to a certain level that a lot of foreign inputs were in those buildings, either as consultant architects, consultant engineers or even the contractor. Yes, it is natural because the consultants and contractors have been exposed. Besides, from where they are coming, there are tall buildings; they built those things before us and so they were experienced before us. How many young engineers in Nigeria can we say when they were training they supervised buildings of 20-storey? How many 20-storey buildings are there in Lagos? So there was no doubt that foreigners had the experience from their own countries, so they gave much confidence to the building. A lot of Nigerian engineers are now coming up gradually, gaining more confidence in building 4 floors, 6 floors and the rest.
You have chaired two probile panels on building collapse previously — the Synagogue Church of All Nations’ guest house collapse, and the Lekki Gardens’ building collapse. Can you relate your experience with these two cases? What were your findings?
From my experience of probing collapse, of course, I was the chairman of the Building Collapse Prevention Guild (BCPG) Committee that probed the Synagogue Church of All Nations’ guest house collapse. I was also the chairman of the Lagos State’s Committee that probed Lekki Gardens. The interesting things about probing building collapse are that what causes a collapse in A is different from what causes a collapse in B, and that justifies that every collapse must be investigated because new things will emerge.
In the case of Synagogue’s building, it was poor supervision and poor workmanship that caused the collapse. The foundation was okay to carry the load; the materials were 100 per cent good; the aggregate was okay. In actual fact, it was Lafarge that supplied them with concrete; they were not mixing concrete on site. So the building materials were good and the foundation could carry it.
Then why did it cave in?
By the time we started looking and piercing the beams, we now saw that there was inadequate supervision. The result was that the welders did not allow the iron rods to key into each other, therefore at the slightest situation, the building went into pieces. As far as we are concerned, poor construction work and supervision caused the building collapse. That is why till today, two engineers are being prosecuted. This is one aspect of this whole thing that I don’t enjoy. People give the impression that even after your work, what did you do? What is the result?
So what is the result?
The result is clear: we have learnt some lessons from it. So when someone is supervising any building, he would be watching the welders how they are arranging the iron rods and things like that. Secondly, they would know that they cannot get away with impunity, so they need to take the supervision very seriously. For the avoidance of doubt, there are two engineers being prosecuted in a law court as I am speaking to the issue.
What about Lekki Gardens’ building collapse?
That is another unfortunate thing that was unnecessary. It was just outright greed that caused the collapse of the building. The house was supposed to have 72 piles to carry the building; only 40 piles were made out of which 34 were good and the remaining 6 failed the test. For the balance of 32 piles which were never made, they now went to put coal-tar drums and poured the concrete. A building that is supposed to be carried by 72 piles ended up being carried by 34 piles, and you now have all these drums which they put concrete to represent piles.
Unfortunately, the engineer that supervised it ran away immediately after the house failed. We have not seen him till today. Even the employer has not been able to produce him. I learnt the guy ran abroad.
But the architect that was involved was recommended for prosecution. I don’t want to comment on it because I don’t know what the government did. But what I know was that before former Governor Ambode left office, he wanted them prosecuted. So the prosecution side of that matter, I don’t know too much about it. I have been reading a lot of nonsense. How can the government want to punish somebody and say go and bring N100 million? I don’t believe in all those things. The benefits we derived from the probing is that: the Lagos State Building Control Agency (LASBCA) now employed professionals just as we recommended. Government has employed over 40 to 50 professionals to LASBCA. Before the probe, about 80 per cent of the staff of LASBCA were town planners. But in our report, we said no, town planners should not be holding that post, they should be engineers, builders and architects. These should be the bulk of the staff of LASBCA because they have to supervise the actual construction of buildings. The state government has accepted our recommendations and the bulk of LASBCA staff today is builders, engineers and architects.
At the Lagos State Materials Testing Laboratory (LSMTL), before that incident, you would not believe that the state government spent so much money to produce so much infrastructure and employed graduates of religious studies, Arabic studies, Yoruba and the likes to man the laboratory. It is unbelievable that it can happen in Lagos, but it happened. So when we did our exercise and discovered these anomalies, we recommended to the government that over 99 per cent of members of the staff of Lagos State Material Testing Laboratory should get out and that they should employ people with relevant qualifications such as engineers to man the place. This has been carried out. So people talk about these investigations and ask what you get from them.
The fallout from the investigations was the issue of regulation for LASBCA. The government set up LASBCA in a hurry and the agency was operating without regulation, but we confronted that. Today, LASBCA has regulations. So when people now condemn former exercises, they are talking out of absolute ignorance. If there is anything to add, it is about correcting misconceptions that it has been a waste of time. No, it is not a waste of time.
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