The president of Housing Development Advocacy Network (HDAN), Barr Festus Adebayo has advised the federal government to immediately commence the probing of housing permit departments and state education boards in Nigeria to ascertain the authenticity of licenses granted to schools. Recall that a three-storey building housing a school collapsed last week at the Ita Faji area of Lagos Island, leading to the death of 20 persons while 45 others sustained various degrees of injury.
To this end, he advocated the immediate establishment of strong technical team that would visit the site and produce informed reports on the immediate cause of the collapse within the stipulated time frame. While noting that such report should be made available publicly upon conclusion of investigation, he challenged all levels of government to end the indiscriminate change of land use on both residential and commercial properties to avert structural design load and further collapses in the future.
In a statement made available to Newsmen in Abuja on behalf of the network, he suggested that the updating and fast tracking of Nigerian building code should be backed by law.
Adebayo, who is also the convener of Abuja International Housing Show, insisted that owners of collapsed buildings whether corporate, government or private bodies should be made to pay for human or material losses recorded at the site. He linked the cause of building collapses to sharp practices by clients and professionals in the built sector, adding that the utilisation of quacks in the construction of private or commercial buildings should be checkmated.
Source: Leadership
