Accountability: a powerful deterrence to building collapse
Accountability: a powerful deterrence to building collapse
By Tochukwu Ezukanma
The number one culprit for building collapse is the Lagos State Building Control Agency (LASBCA), the government agency empowered by law to ensure that builders uphold government stipulated construction standards, and identify and demolish distressed and nonconforming structures. It is the corruption and inefficiency of LASBCA officials that account for the repeated building collapses in the state. They accept bribes from builders, and relax the strictness of the building approval and construction inspection processes, which results in the construction of structurally defective buildings that will, sooner or later, collapse. They also take bribes from landlords, and fail to demolish fatally defective structures.
The collapse of a three storey building, still inhabited by businesses, residents and an illegal primary school in Ita Faji area of Lagos Island on March 13, 2019 was a direct consequence of the corruption and professional negligence of LASBCA officials. For long, the building showed glaring signs of imminent collapse. And, on three different occasions, officials of LASBCA marked it for demolition but each time the landlord forestalled the demolition by bribing LASBCA officials. Finally, the building caved-in, and twenty persons, many of them pupils of the school, died.
We have been so inundated with figures of human death in this our violent country that these figures are beginning to lose their enormity and gravity; they just have a statistical ring. But then, “statistics are like bikinis, what they reveal is important but what they hide is essential”. The statistics (twenty deaths) hid poignant and tear-jerking narratives that attended the Ita Faji tragedy. A father was lamenting the death of his three children. For two weeks, they stayed home because he could not pay their school fees. Then, on that ill-fated day, he got their school fees ready and sent them back to school. As the build collapsed, all his three children died. It was his birthday, and this 10 year old boy refused to go to school. He wanted to stay home and romp around in celebration of his birthday. But his parents objected; reluctantly, he went to school. He died in the building collapse. On receiving the news of the death of her two children in the building collapse, a young mother stepped out of her house, bought poison, took a portion of it and died. Statistics hid the personal trauma, anguish and sorrow of those that lost their love ones. It failed to reveal the personal agony of each life irretrievably shattered by that preventable catastrophe.
The preventable catastrophe was not prevented because the grasping and conscienceless officials of LASBCA repeatedly took bribe and reneged on the demolition of a fatally defective structure that imperiled the lives of many, including children. The only antidote to the routine collapse of buildings is accountability, which demands that the chairman of LASBCA take personal responsibility for the corruption and professional blunders of his subordinates, and resign, and the individual officials, whose actions and inactions led to the Ita Faji calamity arrested, prosecuted and jailed. Secondly, the bereaved families should sue the state Ministry of Education, LASBCA, the landlord and the school proprietor for damages demanding billions of naira.
It is extremely important that government officials, builders and landlords learn the hard way that they will be held accountable for their actions and their consequences. This will be a power deterrent on their corrupt activities, irresponsibility and moral remiss that, in the past, resulted to building collapses in Lagos.
Tochukwu Ezukanma writes from Lagos, Nigeria
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