Unsafe: At least 74 buildings have collapsed in Nigerian cities in the past six years. Photo: Olukayode Jaiyeola/NurPhoto/NurPhoto/AFP
Adekemi Adekunle was invested in her studies at Tai Solarin University of Education in Ogun State in Nigeria. She worked hard. But on the first day of May this year, at around 10.45pm, her life came to an abrupt end when the apartment building in which she lived in Lagos collapsed.
Adekunle and nine others in the three-storey building were killed and scores injured. Despite being marked for demolition, and sealed four times by state government officials, the building remained inhabited.
Its developer, who has yet to be publicly named, is said to be on the run after the incident. They circumvented restrictions and allowed tenants back into the building, charging them exorbitantly for the privilege. Every time there was an order to seal the building, it would be reopened.
A resident of the area, Lanre Shobaloju, said he suspected corruption was involved. “There is a chance that government officials were paid kickbacks,” he said. “The tragedy would have been averted if the tenants had been evacuated.”
Government officials at the city planning agency declined to comment on allegations of corruption. But a worrying pattern has emerged and is difficult to ignore — there’s a long list of similar disasters in major Nigerian cities over the past few years. And it’s growing.
Local media have reported on at least 74 buildings that have collapsed in the past six years. More than 240 people have been killed and at least 260 seriously injured. Each incident displaces scores of households, given that so many involved multi-storey residential buildings in urban areas.
In April, Olasunkanmi Habeeb Okunola, a visiting scientist at Brookings Institute in the United States, published a study examining 167 building collapses in Lagos between 2000 and last year.
He found at least 6 000 households had been displaced as a result. Lagos accounts for nearly four in every 10 building collapses in Nigeria, according to 2019 data from the Building Collapse Prevention Guild, an advocacy group of building professionals.
In the last 20 years, Nigeria’s economy and population have grown rapidly, creating a demand for housing. Local governments have failed to match this demand with government housing or adequate oversight of the real estate developers who have stepped in to fill the gap.
Developers appear to get away with constructing substandard buildings, and rake in rental income from people desperate for accommodation, with authorities either not aware or looking the other way.
A year ago, on 1 November, a luxury flat block in the Ikoyi area of the city came down, killing 44 people, including the developer. It sparked a wave of outrage across the country, yet led to precisely zero prosecutions. Ten more buildings have collapsed since then — most of them in Lagos.
Building expert Emmanuel Oluwa-seyi says both the government and real estate developers are to blame. He said the buildings fell down because of “bad design, overloading of the bearing capacities; failure to obtain approved drawings; the use of defective materials; poor workmanship and illegal conversion of existing structures”. He added: “The regulation of standards and the prosecution of defaulters is abysmal.”
Kehinde Osinaike, general manager of the official agency that issues physical planning permits in Lagos, said the state was prepared to “wield the big stick” on errant developers who put the lives of people at risk for selfish gains, saying in the past officials had tried “civility”, to no avail.
“We are going to instruct our legal team to proceed with arresting these unrepentant developers,” he said.
A bold commitment but one that echoes the official, but empty, promises that have followed every building collapse of the past decade.
This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here