Africa’s leading and pioneer housing advocacy group, Housing Development Advocacy Network (HDAN), has raised an alarm over imminent building collapse in the country, owing to various operational abnormalities, mostly connected to Stakeholders’ drift from building codes and ethics, coupled with the infiltration of the housing sector by quacks.
In a statement released in Abuja on Monday, the Executive Director of HDAN, Festus Adebayo, highlighted figures of collapsed buildings in the recent time across various cities in Nigeria.
HDAN’s warning is coming at a time when the trend of building collapse in the country was becoming worrisome and disheartening.
“In August 2022, a three-story building in Kubwa Satellite town, Abuja, collapsed with two people inside. Similarly, in July 2020, a two-story building that was being built in Abuja collapsed, trapping ten people inside”, Adebayo recounted.
Data, however, show that 49 fatalities emanating from building collapse in Abuja were reported between 2008 and 2018, while breakdown showed that 78.4 percent of the collapsed buildings in Lagos alone between 2001 to 2021, displacing over 6,000 households were residential, 12.8 percent were commercial, and the remaining 8.8 percent were institutional buildings.
Adebayo revealed that HDAN’s recent tour of various projects cutting across Lagos, Abuja, and Portharcourt has shown that developers no longer prioritize the use of quality materials, laying claim on the high cost of building materials, which no doubt, potends great danger to the built sector and the nation at large.
According to him, to stem the ugly tide in the nation’s housing sector, there must be an attitudinal change on the part of regulators and developers, adding that developments in the recent time have shown that a larger chunk of the sector’s regulators only work for themselves and against the interest and vision of the sector.
“Unfortunately, some regulatory bodies have turned Government jobs to meal tickets. In fact, in a situation whereby the head of a regulatory agency is not ready to compromise, some of the subordinates or people under such a head have a way of making their boss to compromise. On the other hand, many engineers work without licenses, hence raising the possibility of numerous collapses especially in the nation’s capital and Lagos in the years to come”, he noted.
The advocacy group, therefore, urged governments at all levels to have the political will to address the menace of building collapse plaguing the nation, saying “we have lost so many lives in building collapse. A Government that can not value the lives of its citizens can not be said to be responsible. There is a need for total reorientation of Nigerians if we want to stop building collapse.”
He concluded by saying that “defaulting regulatory agencies and developers must be prosecuted because as of today, no defaulter has been prosecuted or jailed. When perpetrators of this ugly practice are prosecuted, they will serve as a deterrent to others.”
