According to the most recent report from the Building Collapse Prevention Guild, Nigeria saw roughly 604 building collapses between 1974 and May 30, 2024.
According to the data, over 346 buildings in Lagos State have collapsed in the last 50 years, accounting for 57.28 percent of all building collapses.
According to the survey, Lagos State accounts for 57.28 per cent of recorded cases involving building collapses in Nigeria, which has been a serious issue over the years. Lagos is now the state most hit, with Anambra at 3.98 percent, Abuja at 3.65 percent, and Oyo at 3.48 percent.
Remarkably, in 2022, the states of Taraba, Bayelsa, Gombe, and Yobe reported the first building collapses ever documented. States like Zamfara, Taraba, Yobe, Bauchi, Bayelsa, Sokoto, Gombe, Katsina, and Kebbi, on the other hand, have all only had one building collapse documented.
1971, 1975, and 1981 did not have any documented building collapses. Forty percent of the 45 building collapses in Nigeria in 2020 occurred in Lagos, where 18 of the events occurred despite the Covid-19 shutdown.
In 2022, the most building collapses in the nation, according to the research, occurred.
It elaborated, saying that Lagos accounted for 20 of the 62 accidents nationwide in year 2022, or 32 per cent, of the total number of building collapses. With 52 collapses reported nationwide in 2023, Lagos once again took the lead with 17 events, or 33% of all collapses. In 2024, there were 11 building collapses that were officially reported; Lagos had 5, Anambra had 3, and Kano, Niger, and Plateau each had 1.
In October 1974, Oyo State experienced the first building collapse in Nigerian history. Twenty-seven persons lost their lives in this incident when a multi-story structure fell as a result of excessive loading.
Furthermore, 52 persons lost their lives in the catastrophic fall of the tallest building in Lagos on November 1, 2021. On Thursday, May 30, 2024, another four-story building collapsed on Lagos Island, trapping an unknown number of people. The incident occurred at Iga Iduganran, near the Oba of Lagos’ palace.
The Lagos State Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Gbenga Omotosho, confirmed the development on his X account.
According to Omotosho, eight people had been rescued.
“A four-storey building has collapsed at Iga Iduganran, Lagos Island. The Lagos State Emergency Management Agency officials have rescued eight people from the rubble. They are battling to retrieve two others from the rubble. The structure had been marked by LASBCA for evacuation,” Omotosho said.
That came less than a week after an 11-year-old girl and three persons lost their lives when a mosque that was hit by an excavator collapsed in the Papa Ajao area of the state.
The guild’s findings showed that a sizable portion of the collapses reported during the review period were caused by professional incompetence, which included things like excessive loading, the use of substandard building materials, defective design, poor workmanship, and weak foundation.
The November 1, 2021, collapse of a 21-story building along Gerrard Road in the Ikoyi neighbourhood of Lagos State was one of the most devastating cases.
The founder President of the Building Collapse Prevention Guild, Kunle Awobodu, attributed the constant building collapses in Lagos State to lax standards.
Awobodu claims that a lot of quacks have gained confidence since various government apparatuses and regulatory authorities have either been unable or unwilling to prosecute and condemn those proven guilty of professional incompetence in relation to building collapse occurrences.
“I was on the committee that established some of the agencies,” he stated. The creation and application of policies are not the same things. One of the things we found was that, in comparison to the size of Lagos’ built environment, the building control agency had a rather small workforce.
Quackery is another significant issue. Developers are required to submit their approval plan and go through an approval procedure that includes a structural design review to discover irregularities in order to prevent the frequency of buildings collapses.
